A Comparative Study of Microservices Frameworks in IoT Deployments

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has grown dramatically in both size and complexity since its inception in 2009. One of the areas that has seen interesting developments is that of resource-constrained devices. Evidently such devices require careful engineering to better manage resources such as energy and memory, whilst still ensuring acceptable performance. The choice of software architecture and implementation are two key decisions for the engineering of such systems. The microservices architecture has been proposed, by a number of researchers, as a promising approach for IoT. However, limited research has been done on the implementation of microservices in IoT and resource-constrained devices. The aim of this paper is to compare a number of microservices frameworks in the context of IoT. The microservices frameworks are listed and compared using various criteria, thereby providing an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of each of the frameworks.