MicroIP: A general-purpose microservice-based integration platform

The development of large-scale software systems is usually supported by integration platforms, which provide connectivity and mediation capabilities to facilitate the integration of heterogeneous and distributed applications. Integration platforms have traditionally been built as monolithic systems which, in some of the current contexts (e.g. market's high pace of demand, large amount of users and data), present issues in terms of scalability, maintainability and fault tolerance, among others. In turn, microservices architecture is an approach for developing applications as a set of small independent services, which may contribute to address such limitations (e.g. maintaining and scaling services independently, according to their specific needs). Indeed, various integration platform proposals leveraging this approach have emerged during the last years. However, those proposals are domain-specific and/or they do not provide insights regarding the architecture and implementation of the platform. This paper proposes a general-purpose microservice-based integration platform, which aims to address limitations of monolithic solutions and of the aforementioned existing proposals. Our work comprises the definition of the platform and its main functionality, a description of its microservice-based architecture, and implementation alternatives as well as prototypes for some of its main components.