Modeling Interactions Among Microservices Communicating via FIFO or Bag Buffers

Abstract

Interactions among individual microservices communicating asynchronously via FIFO or bag buffers vary significantly even for the same buffer size. Different interactions among microservices will lead to different interaction behaviors, which can make microservices systems malfunction during their execution. However, these two asynchronous communication models with FIFO or bag buffers are seldom distinguished. In this paper, we present new results for the interaction differences between one asynchronous communication model with FIFO buffers and another asynchronous communication model with bag buffers. First, we propose a framework to uniformly define two asynchronous communication models. Second, we model interaction behaviors among microservices as sequences of send and receive message actions under these two asynchronous communication models. Finally, we compare these two asynchronous communication models using refinement checking to show their differences. Experimental results show that the asynchronous communication model with FIFO buffers is included in the asynchronous communication model with bag buffers.