A Variability-Enabling and Model-Driven Approach to Adaptive Microservice-based Systems

A microservice-based system is composed of numerous independently deployed and executed microservices, among which normally exist the complex dependencies. Traditional service composition approaches usually expect the business process predefined at design time. As a result, it is difficult for the microservice-based system to quickly adapt to the frequently changing operation environments and business requirements. To address the above limitations, we propose a variability-enabling and model-driven approach to developing adaptive microservice-based systems. Our approach first models the business process with variability using VxBPMN4MS, an extension of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) with support for variability, then transforms the business process model to variability supported microservice composition frameworks, and finally derives business process instances at run-time according to the predefined process configuration. We have developed a platform to automate the proposed approach as much as possible, and conducted a case study to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and platform.