Collecting Information from a decentralized microservice architecture

Abstract: As a system grows in size, it is common that it is transformed into a microservice architecture. In order to be able monitor this new architecture there is a need to collect information from the microservices. The software company IDA Infront is transitioning their product iipax to a microservice architecture and is faced with this problem. In order to solve this, they propose the use of a Message-oriented Middleware (MOM). There exists many different MOMs that are suitable to execute this task. The aim of this thesis is to determine, in terms of latency, throughput and scalability, which MOM is best suitable for this. Out of four suitable MOMs Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ are chosen for further testing and benchmarking. The tests display that RabbitMQ is able to send single infrequent messages (latency) faster than Kafka. But it is also shown that Kafka is faster at sending a lot of messages rapidly and with an increased number of producers sending messages (throughput and scalability). However, the scalability test suggests that RabbitMQ possibly scales better with a larger amount of microservices, thus more testing is needed to get a definite conclusion.