Microservice Platform Research Articles

Designing Digital Platforms for Social Justice: Empowering End-Users Through the Dataswyft Platform

Digital platforms have radically transformed how we work, shop, and socialize. Despite their numerous benefits, they may also threaten social justice due to unforeseen or unintended consequences of specific design choices, preventing end-users from participating equitably in the digital economy. As platform owners compete by leveraging personal data, it remains unclear how digital platforms can be designed to empower end-users to control, legally own, and benefit from their data in a privacy-preserving way. Integrating design science research with heuristic theorizing, this study proposes a design theory for end-user-centric digital platforms. We derive design theory components from over nine years of data regarding the Dataswyft platform, including five meta-requirements and eight design principles. They reveal how digital platforms can be designed for social justice to address distributive and procedural social injustices by empowering end-users, both technically and legally, to protect and control their data through a containerized microservice platform infrastructure. This platform design includes multiple data protection layers, end-user-driven data collection, reconfiguration, and exchange functionalities, safeguarding mechanisms, and semi-centralized ecosystem governance structures. By evaluating an expository instantiation of the proposed design principles, we demonstrate the applicability and utility of our design theory, paving the way for data self-sovereignty and social sustainability.

Practice of Alibaba cloud on elastic resource provisioning for large‐scale microservices cluster

SummaryCloud‐native architecture is becoming increasingly crucial for today's cloud computing environments due to the need for speed and flexibility in developing applications. It utilizes microservice technology to break down traditional monolithic applications into light‐weight and self‐contained microservice components. However, as microservices grow in scale and have dynamic inter‐dependencies, they also pose new challenges in resource provisioning that cannot be fully addressed by traditional resource scheduling approaches. The various microservices with different resource demands and latency requirements can create complex calling chains, making it difficult to provide fine‐grained and accurate resource allocation to each component while maintaining the overall quality of service in the chain. Alibaba Cloud has fully embraced cloud‐native and microservice technologies to drive its key business and scenarios, including Double 11 Shopping Festival. In this work, we aim to address the research problem on how to efficiently provision resources for the growing scale of microservice platform and ensure the performance of latency‐critical microservices. To address the problem, we present in‐depth analyses of Alibaba's microservice cluster and propose optimized resource provisioning algorithms to enhance resource utilization while ensuring the latency requirement. First, we analyze the distinct features of microservices in Alibaba's cluster compared to traditional applications. Then we present Alibaba's resource capacity provisioning workflow and framework to address challenges in resource provisioning for large‐scale and latency‐critical microservice clusters. Finally, we propose enhanced resource provisioning algorithms over Alibaba's current practice by making both proactive and reactive scheduling decisions based on different workloads patterns, which can improve resource usage by 10%–15% in Alibaba's clusters, while maintaining the necessary latency for microservices.

An IoT-Based Microservice Platform for Virtual Puppetry Performance

An IoT-Based Microservice Platform for Virtual Puppetry Performance

Aeroponic systems design: considerations and challenges

Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) holds promise as a way to intensify current agricultural production systems while limiting pressures on land, water, and energy resources. However, its use has not yet been widely adopted, in part because the engineering design considerations and associated challenges are not well known. This is even more apparent for aeroponics, where the additional cost and complexities in controlling atomization have yet to establish an advantage in scale over simpler hydroponic systems To shed light on these considerations and challenges, an instrumented aeroponic system was prototyped with the goal of creating a quantitative model of growth for various species of leafy greens. As the first consideration, pressure swirl atomizers were paired with a diaphragm-type pressure tank to supply the necessary pressures needed for effective atomization. Secondly, nutrient solution was mixed on-demand from Reverse Osmosis (RO) water and concentrated nutrient stock then pumped into the pressure tank using a positive displacement pump. A bamboo-based substrate that allowed both germination and extended vegetative growth was supported on a stainless steel mesh and PVC frame acting as a grow tray. Finally, a camera microservice platform was developed to quantify plant growth using a computer vision pixel-based segmentation method.

A Review on Transformation of Monolithic Applications towards Microservices Environment

The traditional monolithic approach is widely employed in centralized software development, deployment, and reusability, as the modules are tightly connected, causing several challenges in programming. The study utilized different techniques for the easy transformation of several running monolithic applications to micro services including, Angular 2, REST API, Web application and several other architectural approaches are discussed. This review paper highlights the significance of microservices and the transformation of monolithic applications towards microservices. As multiple software applications are an integral part of a traditional monolithic application, the modules cannot be extended separately, and different modules cannot use various technology stacks. So, monolithic source code must be migrated to the microservice platform in order to extend `the lifecycle of applications in today's environment. However, due to structural complexity, scattered application logic, and dependency upon external framework libraries, the transformation towards a microservices platform is quite challenging. A Microservice architecture is a container of loosely coupled independent services making a flexible system. In this study, potential areas for the transformation of monolithic application source code are highlighted. Furthermore, key challenges and open research issues in this area are highlighted, requiring the research community's attention. The study concludes that Microservices are not a one-size-fits-all solution for every challenging situation. Monolithic transformation requires significant amount of time and effort on the part of everyone in the business.

BMP: Toward a Broker-less and Microservice Platform for Internet of Thing

BMP: Toward a Broker-less and Microservice Platform for Internet of Thing

Analyzing the Aftermath of PSB Micro Service Portal Implementation in India

‘PSB Portal’ is a micro-service digital platform which primarily connects funding needs of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to Banks for business. It is a strategic initiative of SIBDI with five other Public Sector Banks and was launched by Government of India, in November 2018, to provide loans to MSMEs of up to Rs.1 crore. The main motive of this initiative is to ease the process of fund availability to MSMEs and decrease the turnaround time of credit delivery to MSME sector. The new ‘PSB portal’ also makes it possible to provide timely finance at reasonable and competitive rates of interest to MSME sector. MSME sector forms a vital component of the economy in terms of their contribution to employment generation, exports and inclusive growth. One-third of the country's GDP is contributed by more than 50 million MSMEs in India. Thus, the role of MSMEs in the economic and social development of the country is not to be over-looked. There is need for finance that meets the life-cycle needs of MSMEs with a strong oversight mechanism in Banks to see that MSME-related lending policies are implemented at the operating level, is high. Such measures by the Government would serve the purpose of ease of access to funding requirements of MSME’s and also help open new avenues for Banks to increase their business while tapping new customers thereby increasing their priority sector assets. It will make formal banking more inclusive and deepen the roots of financial inclusion via digitization in the economy. After almost after a year of this initiative, on September 5 2019, Retail products (Home Loan Personal Loan and Auto Loan) were also added to the portal to increase the ease of credit to retail customers to further facilitate purchasing power in the economy. This paper will analyse the challenges faced by the Bankers while financing MSMEs via PSB portal and the reasons for rejection of the applications with further prospects of the scheme.

Design and Achievement of Security Mechanism of API Gateway Platform Based on Microservice Architecture

To solve the current security problems of the microservice architecture, the security mechanism of the API gateway platform using the microservice platform is designed and implemented. To solve the corresponding security problems, a new API platform security mechanism is designed. In the data transmission, the hybrid encryption algorithm hybridized by encryption algorithm of Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA) and encryption algorithm of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is used for data encryption. An API gateway between the client and the microservice is introduced as the only entrance for users to access the microservice, avoiding the complexity of the client logic caused by the direct communication between the client and the server. After the introduction of the API gateway, the API-level service operation authority can be controlled; the security of the front-end and back-end transmission data is improved without affecting the transmission performance. The algorithm designed takes longer time than the AES encryption algorithm, but shorter than the RSA encryption algorithm, which indicates that the time-consuming of the algorithm designed is acceptable, showing the feasibility of the algorithm. The content can provide an important theoretical basis for the security of API gateway platform of microservice architecture.

Design and Implementation of Network Information Service Platform Based on Microservice Architecture

In this paper, based on the development of network information microservice platform, and according to the business characteristics of the platform, the overall architecture model of the microservice platform was designed. Besides, the system is hierarchically managed by basic equipment area, standard area, hub area, and application service area. Hence, the problems of independent deployment, data transmission sharing, service monitoring, and authority management of the microservice system are solved. Moreover, the system development process, the development efficiency, and the system reliability are also improved. The project which is supplemented by a sound management mechanism implements the framework of service platform based on Spring Cloud technology, establishes the business container of microservice, analyzes the value of the system, and then forms a sustainable optimization system.

Performance Modeling of Microservice Platforms

Microservice architecture has transformed the way developers are building and deploying applications in the nowadays cloud computing centers. This new approach provides increased scalability, flexibility, manageability, and performance while reducing the complexity of the whole software development life cycle. The increase in cloud resource utilization also benefits microservice providers. Various microservice platforms have emerged to facilitate the DevOps of containerized services by enabling continuous integration and delivery. Microservice platforms deploy application containers on virtual or physical machines provided by public/private cloud infrastructures in a seamless manner. In this article, we study and evaluate the provisioning performance of microservice platforms by incorporating the details of all layers (i.e., both micro and macro layers) in the modeling process. To this end, we first build a microservice platform on top of Amazon EC2 cloud and then leverage it to develop a comprehensive performance model to perform what-if analysis and capacity planning for microservice platforms at scale. In other words, the proposed performance model provides a systematic approach to measure the elasticity of the microservice platform by analyzing the provisioning performance at both the microservice platform and the back-end macroservice infrastructures.

Vessel to shore data movement through the Internet of Floating Things: A microservice platform at the edge

SummaryThe rise of the Internet of Things has generated high expectations about the improvement in people's lifestyles. In the last decade, we saw several examples of instrumented cities where different types of data were gathered, processed, and made available to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. In this framework, sensors and actuators became leading actors of technologically pervasive urban environments. However, in coastal areas, marine data crowdsourcing is difficult to apply due to the challenging operational conditions, extremely unstable network connectivity, and security issues in data movement. To fill this gap, we present a novel version of our DYNAMO transfer protocol (DTP), a platform‐independent data mover framework where data collected on board of vessels are stored locally and then moved from the edge to the cloud when the operating conditions are favorable. We evaluate the performance of DTP in a controlled environment with a private cloud by measuring the time it takes for the clouds ide to process and store a fixed amount of data while varying the number of microservice instances. We show that the time decreases exponentially when the number of microservice instances goes from 1 to 16 and it remains constant above that number.

Research on Micro Service Architecture of Power Information System Based on Docker Container

With the development of energy internet, the complexity of power information system is increasing day by day, and the ecosphere of cooperation and sharing among different industries is gradually formed. Based on Docker container technology and Kubernetes container layout technology, this paper studies the design principle and top-level architecture of power information system micro-service platform, and proposes the implementation scheme of service discovery, message communication and load balancing in power information system micro-service. Finally, the performance of the system is verified by simulation experiments.

Clustering-Based Emotion Recognition Micro-Service Cloud Framework for Mobile Computing

In a situation where life becomes more stressful and challenging, people feel compelled to be more concerned about their mental situation. Different emotional statuses are external reactions to different mental states. Therefore, researchers always identify people's mental situation by monitoring their real-time emotions. At the same time, due to the availability of built-in sensors in a smartphone, applications that can identify real-time emotions of mobile users are constantly emerging. However, compared to most emotion recognition algorithms, computing resources and battery life in mobile phones are always limited. This makes accuracy and latency of these applications are unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a micro-service platform for mobile emotion recognition application developers (MSPMERAD) which can supply high performance. First, a classifier fusion emotion recognition algorithm is proposed by using a dynamic adaptive fusion strategy. Second, this new algorithm is encapsulated into a micro-service. With other affiliated micro-services such as data uploading, preprocessing, etc., developers can ignore the implementation of the emotion recognition algorithm and just focus on how to collect sensor data and interact with users. The accuracy and latency of one application based on the MSPMERAD are compared with another application that is implemented using a locale emotion recognition algorithm. Experiments based on the daily behavior data of 50 student volunteers show that the application based on our platform has higher recognition accuracy with a more reasonable time.

Construction and Management of Micro-service Platform of Libraries in Universities and Colleges under the Circumstance of We-media

This paper focuses on the in-depth study of construction and management of micro-service platform of libraries in universities and colleges under the circumstance of we-media, which mainly elaborates several optimization measures through the problems existing in the construction of micro-service platform of university libraries, for example, enriching the content of micro-service platform, continuously improving the interactivity in the construction of micro-service platform, increasing publicity and improving the level of technical management, etc., thereby promoting the smooth construction of micro-service platform of libraries in universities and colleges, constantly improving the service level and ability of libraries in universities and colleges, and obtaining high satisfaction from readers.