Process implications of executable domain models for microservices development

Abstract

Microservice architecture has been recognized as an important enabler for continuous development of many cloud-based systems. Code generation has been tried in the tool chain of building microservices. However, most existing tools generally do not consider the risks from continuous development. We have been developing a toolkit which generates microservices from application domain models. Our approach aligns development process to this toolkit and coordinates domain modeling activity over project life cycles. In this paper, we describe its framework and corresponding development process which eliminates delays brought by the uncertainty of a project at a relatively early stage. Several minimum viable products have been built upon the proposed approach during the past years, including automated generation of code from domain decomposition. Our result shows 10% saving of effort and fewer issues. Effort saving increases to 30% under an extreme condition with high-rate personnel turnover. We also discuss our findings on running these projects and raise discussion and questions for future enhancement.