Microservices from frameworks to domain specific languages

This thesis explores the current state of microservice-based architectures, with particular emphasis on how microservices-based systems are structured and implemented and what are the limitations of today’s most common approaches which are essentially based on the use of Software Frameworks. Furthemore, we discuss methods to reduce the impact of such limitations and improve microservice development by means of techniques based on Domain Specific Languages and Software Factories. At the same time, an effort is made to move towards a more precise definition of what microservices are with reference to two primary aspects of any distributed system: a) the nature of the system as a whole in terms of structure, behavior and interaction between its components; b) the nature of the system’s components themselves, i.e. microservices. Microservices are therefore characterized as systems by proposing a further partitioning into smaller entities, referred to as nanoservices, that can be implemented as actors in the Actor Model sense, thus applying the microservice architectural pattern to the design and development of individual microservice. Finally, all results are aggregated into a comprehensive conceptual framework whose purpose is to provide guidelines in order deal with the problem of creating microservice-based systems.