An exploratory evaluation of replacing ESB with microservices in service-oriented architecture

Abstract

With the continuous progress in technology during the past few decades, cloud computing has become a fast-growing technology in the world, making computerized systems widespread. The emergence of Cloud Computing has evolved towards microservice concepts, which are highly demanded by corporates for enterprise application level. Most enterprise applications have moved away from traditional unified models of software programs like monolithic architecture and traditional SOA architecture to microservice architecture to ensure better scalability, lesser investment in hardware, and high performance. The monolithic architecture is designed in a manner that all the components and the modules are packed together and deployed on a single binary. However, in the microservice architecture, components are developed as small services so that horizontally and vertically scaling is made easier in comparison to monolith or SOA architecture. SOA and monolithic architecture are at a disadvantage compared to Microservice architecture, as they require colossal hardware specifications to scale the software. In general terms, the system performance of these architectures can be measured considering different aspects such as system capacity, throughput, and latency. This research focuses on how scalability and performance software quality attributes behave when converting the SOA system to microservice architecture. Experimental results have shown that microservice architecture can bring more scalability with a minimum cost generation. Nevertheless, specific gaps in performance are identified in the perspective of the final user experiences due to the interservice communication in the microservice architecture in a distributed environment.