Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Master of Science

Program

Computer Science

Supervisor

Nazim H. Madhavji

Abstract

Context & Motivation/problem: In the context that cloud platforms are widely adopted, Microservice Architecture (MSA) has quickly become the new paradigm for modern software development due to its great modularity, scalability, and resiliency, which fits well in the cloud environment. However, to embrace the benefits of MSA, organizations must overcome the challenges of adopting new methodologies and processes to deal with the extra development complexities that microservices created, e.g., establishing interface-based communication between distributed services and managing the configurations and locations of services. Consequently, creating a microservice-based application is relatively complex and effortful. Research Question: How to create a tool to automate the development of microservice-based applications? Principal Ideas: In this research, we created WesternAccelerator, a tool to generate extensible microservice-based skeleton applications. This tool embodies the design patterns for building an MSA and automates time-consuming development tasks. Contribution: Currently, numerous tools are available to assist in developing microservices, but most of them serve a particular purpose, such as configuration management or service discovery. Our solution is an improvement by merging technologies from different problem domains and provides the service in an automated manner. Conclusion: By empirical validation, we conclude that the tool we have created aids in building microservice-based applications relatively quickly and effortlessly.

Summary for Lay Audience

Microservices architecture embodies elements and principles for structuring and developing a collection of software services as cloud-based applications. Microservices allow a large application to be divided into smaller independent parts, with each part having its own responsibility. Microservice architecture is a recent paradigm for modern software development. However, building microservices is challenging because it is complex to manage many small and distributed services regarding their configurations, network locations, and health status. This thesis proposes WesternAccelerator, a tool that simplifies the development of microservices through its capability of generating runnable microservice-based skeleton applications pre-fabricated with solutions for configuring, discovering, securing, and tracing services.

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