An analysis of microservice frameworks

Abstract: Microservice architecture has entered the industry to solve some of the problems with the monolithic architecture. However, this architecture comes with its own set of problems. In order to solve the microservice architecture problems while also providing additional functionalities, microservice frameworks have been developed. In this thesis, microservice frameworks were compared and thereafter two were chosen to implement a small part of a large monolithic system as microservices. This was done in order to see how well they could implement the different functionalities that the frameworks provided in relation to the benefits and the cross-cutting concerns of the microservice architecture which are concerns that is applicable to the entire system. The results showed that the frameworks embraced the benefits of the microservice architecture in the aspects of maintainability and scalability. However, in the terms of being able to change frameworks in the pursuit of newer technologies there were problems. Some functionalities such as service discovery requires all of the new services created to use the same mechanism in order to create a unified system. There were also problems caused by the load balancing mechanism provided by the frameworks used in this thesis. The load balancing mechanism made the system unable to send large data files which was crucial for the system that was to be implemented as a microservice system.