Reaching consensus in decentralized coordination of distributed microservices

Abstract Decentralized Microservice compositions can be implemented in the environments of mobile cloud, edge or other computing paradigms. When a decentralized microservice composition wants to reach consensus among its participants at runtime, missing a coordinator makes it to adopt a feasible mechanism to coordinate service components. This work studies the issue. It begins with analyzing data dependences among composite microservices, and then summaries basic structural patterns in the compositions according to the dependences. Based on the Saga method, this paper proposes coordination mechanisms for the composite microservices, and conducts two different experiments to evaluate the mechanisms. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanisms can prompt composite microservices to reach consensus at runtime, and the corresponding implementations can work effectively.