Building Critical Applications using Microservices

TL;DR

This paper explores how microservices and secure containers can be used to develop critical applications, addressing challenges in supporting fail-operational requirements with current tools and proposing areas for future research.

Contribution

It analyzes the current capabilities and limitations of microservices and secure containers for critical applications, highlighting open research questions for fail-operational support.

Findings

Secure containers enhance security for critical microservices

Current tools support fail-stop but not fail-operational applications

Open research questions remain for ensuring fail-operational reliability

Abstract

Microservices - combined with secure containers - facilitate new ways to build critical applications. These applications will benefit from many tools and services built for less critical software. The more stringent requirements of critical applications are addressed with the help of secure containers and compiler extensions. While this approach is sufficient for implementing fail-stop applications, there are still several open research questions regarding if and how fail-operational applications could be supported using this approach.