Protocol-Based Engineering of Microservices

Protocol-Based Engineering of Microservices

연구 분야: Software Development

학회: International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

The microservices pattern is increasingly used in industry to realize applications in a decentralized manner, often with the help of novel programming models such as Microsoft-originated Dapr. Multiagent systems have typically been conceptualized as being decentralized. This naturally brings us to the question: Can multiagent software abstractions benefit the enterprise of realizing applications via microservices? To answer this question, in this paper, we show how interaction protocols, a fundamental multiagent abstraction, can be applied toward realizing an application as a set of microservices. Specifically, we take a third-party application that exemplifies Dapr’s programming model and reengineer it based on protocols. We evaluate the differences between our protocol-based implementation of the application and the Dapr-based implementation and find that our protocol-based implementation provides an improved developer experience in terms of cleaner, better-structured code. We conclude that (1) protocols represent a highly promising abstraction suited to the modeling and engineering of microservices-based applications and (2) Dapr augmented with a protocol-based programming model would be highly beneficial to the microservices enterprise.