A service mesh approach to integrate processing patterns into microservices applications

Abstract

Cloud is the new enabler of data processing, archiving and analyzing, wherein offered services are built with flexible and low-coupling schemes following a microservice architecture, which is commonly managed by service mesh managers. Microservice architecture allows designers to build microservice systems based on design patterns. However, current service mesh managers are based only on pipeline patterns and delegate the construction of other patterns to virtual container managers. This limitation prevents designers from defining new patterns that can provide microservice systems with different features. This paper presents a new approach for constructing microservices systems that integrate processing patterns following a service mesh strategy. This approach will enable designers to create processing patterns not considered in current service meshes and to build designs based on the combination of patterns. The approach proposes the integration of components for implicit handling of processing patterns; this means that service mesh core tasks such as discovery process, microservice coupling and workload management become transparent, eliminating manager or end-user intervention. Encouraging results were obtained, in terms of performance and execution flexibility, in a case study, where a set of existing applications collaborating in a traditional workflow was converted into a microservice application integrating processing patterns (parallel and distributed) generated following this new approach.