A Design Science Research Methodology for Microservice Architecture and System Research

Abstract

As enterprise continue their Digital journey, Monolithic architecture approach of building Digital platforms has now proven to be inefficient and obsolete. Architectural paradigms in software development are changing with the spinning of time. The paradigms of architecture, formerly considered sufficiently well architecture and even dominant over the years, are now referred to as monolithic. The demands for fresh technology approaches are continuously evolving to cope the new set of business challenges. [25] The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the approach with an experiment in designing a microservice system. The thesis motivates, presents, demonstrates in use, and evaluates a methodology in microservice system for conducting Design Science (DS) research. Moreover, the thesis will go through in detail description of Microservice architecture and enables us to differentiate and find the right Software Development Methodology (SDM) for the Digital platform. SDM enables the proper management of the software development processes, the project team, products and services in terms of cost effectiveness, time, and quality. [23] The objective of this thesis is to investigate the differences in between architectural paradigms such as monolithic, cloud native and microservice and find the appropriate paradigm that satisfy the enterprises for continuing their digital business. The research of using different platforms and environment for possible improvement on the software development process that enables easy to develop, run and ship distributed application easily and anywhere will be carried out. Similarly, research also focuses on maintaining the development environment consistent, testable and maintainable and hosting the application to the cloud irrespective to underling infrastructure and operation system. The research artifacts will help the enterprises and stakeholders to take an important decision in the selection of the architectural paradigm for their digital platform in advance. The paper concludes that, Microservice architecture is one of the well-known SDM suitable for large enterprise software business application.