An Ontology-based Approach for Domain-driven Design of Microservice Architectures

Abstract

Microservice Architecture (MSA) is an emerging service-based architectural style that focuses on the design and implementation of highly scalable distributed software systems. To analyze the business domain and its decomposition into services Domain-driven Design (DDD) is commonly applied. DDD is an approach for designing software that relies on various model-based concepts to express knowledge about the business domain, e.g. the Bounded Context (BC) pattern, which clusters a set of coherent Domain Models (DM). In addition to the fact that MSAs fosters a high degree of team independence, the uncoordinated evolution of DMs that originally were semantically equivalent or partially shared similar semantics can occur. In this paper, we identify challenges related to the semantic decoupling of DMs. Additionally, we present a metamodel for modeling MSAs based on the principles of DDD which allows the expression of semantics for relationships between fragmented DMs and SMs.