Automated capacity analysis of limitation-aware microservices architectures

Abstract

Over the last years, the concept of API economy has fostered the creation of an ecosystem of public APIs used as business elements. These APIs include various pricing plans, which allow developers to consume an API for a specific price and under certain conditions. These conditions include capacity limits, a.k.a. limitations, that limit the usage of the API. Additionally, modern web applications are usually based on a microservices architecture (MSA), in which multiple services communicate with each other through public APIs using a standardized paradigm, commonly RESTful. When an MSA consumes external APIs with limitations, it is necessary to analyse the impact of these limitations in its capacity. These MSAs are known as Limitation-Aware Microservices Architecture (LAMA). This PhD dissertation aims to provide an automated framework to analyse the capacity of a LAMA given the formal description of its internal topology and the external pricing plans. This framework would be used to solve analysis operations, which deal with the extraction of useful information that helps developers build their LAMAs.