Evaluating BPM Workflow Engine for Integrating Microservice-based Applications

The use of microservice architecture has increased drastically in recent years. As this approach offers many advantages, e.g., agility, higher scalability and flexibility, when working with constantly growing and evolving applications, a large number of big enterprises such as Uber and Netflix have been using it. There are, however, new challenges that emerge such as the increased complexity when integrating distributed services. Moreover, business flows that span across multiple services lack an end-to-end governance. A solution for these problems can be the use of a BPM workflow engine for monitoring and executing the end-to-end business processes.

This thesis provides an evaluation of the benefits and challenges of integrating processcentric microservice-based applications using a workflow engine. Furthermore, it compares this approach to two other – non-process-centric microservices and process-centric microservices without workflow engine. Our results show that the of a BPM workflow engine is the most beneficial approach in various use cases.

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