Exploring emergent microservice evolution in elastic deployment environments

Rodrigues Filho, Roberto and Sene, Iwens and Porter, Barry and Bittencourt, Luiz and Kon, Fabio and Costa, Fábio (2025) Exploring emergent microservice evolution in elastic deployment environments. Journal of Systems and Software, 219: 112252. ISSN 0164-1212

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Abstract

Microservices have become an important technology to enable the dynamic composition of large-scale self-adaptive systems. Although modern microservice ecosystems provide a variety of autonomous adaptation mechanisms, when focusing on the microservice itself, they can only account for changes in the sheer increase in workload volume. On the other hand, when workload patterns change, efficient treatment requires the intervention of DevOps experts to manually evolve the internal architecture of services. Given the need to quickly adapt systems to respond to changes, solely relying on DevOps to react to workload pattern changes becomes a bottleneck for future systems. To address this issue, we advance the concept of emergent microservices, that autonomously adapt and evolve their internal architectural composition to better handle changes in the pattern of incoming requests without human intervention. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by exploring this novel concept in the context of a microservice-based Smart City platform.