Engineering Self-adaptive Microservice Applications: An Experience Report

This paper reports our experience in engineering RAMSES, a Reusable Autonomic Manager for microServicES that conforms to the well-known MAPE-K feedback control loop model to realize self-adaptive microservices. The goal of RAMSES is to enforce the satisfaction of user-defined QoS attributes (e.g., availability, performance) of a microservice application at runtime. RAMSES's control loop components themselves are microservices. RAMSES is designed to ease its reuse across microservice applications. To illustrate RAMSES, we describe how we used it for making self-adaptive an e-food microservice application. We report the results of an experimental evaluation we conducted to validate the capability of RAMSES. Finally, we discuss our experience in facing existing challenges as well as the main lessons learned.