Analysis and evaluation of composition languages and orchestration engines for microservices

Abstract

Microservices architecture (MSA) is an approach which fosters using granular services formed around business capabilities. Although this brings many advantages regarding scalability and makes the application more flexible, the orchestration and communication of these services become more challenging. Having granular microservices means that end-to-end business processes generally span several microservices and the logic and the order of execution of these microservices must be specified. The industry has foreseen this challenge and companies such as Uber and Netflix have developed their orchestration engines. Moreover, composition languages have emerged which emphasize the need for new programming languages with special constructs particularly designed for MSA. In this work, we evaluate and analyze the tools, driven by both industry and academia, which are suitable for microservices composition and orchestration in order to find a reference architecture. To determine the current state of research as well as industry with regards to microservices composition and orchestration, a systematic literature review (SLR) is conducted which discovers the existing tools and enable performing an unbiased evaluation. Then the discovered tools are evaluated and analyzed to find a reference architecture. Based on the results of the evaluation, a prototype is implemented which proposes a reference architecture for the orchestration engines.