From Monolith to Microservices: Software Architecture for Autonomous UAV Infrastructure Inspection

TL;DR

This paper discusses migrating an autonomous UAV infrastructure inspection application from monolithic to microservices architecture, improving processing time, scalability, and maintainability through DevOps practices and Kubernetes deployment.

Contribution

It presents a detailed methodology for migrating a UAV inspection application from monolith to microservices, demonstrating performance improvements and better scalability.

Findings

Reduced route calculation processing time

Enhanced scalability through Kubernetes deployment

Successful migration validated by performance metrics

Abstract

Linear-infrastructure Mission Control (LiMiC) is an application for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) infrastructure inspection mission planning developed in monolithic software architecture. The application calculates routes along the infrastructure based on the users' inputs, the number of UAVs participating in the mission, and UAVs' locations. LiMiC1.0 is the latest application version migrated from monolith to microservices, continuously integrated, and deployed using DevOps tools to facilitate future features development, enable better traffic management, and improve the route calculation processing time. Processing time was improved by refactoring the route calculation algorithm into services, scaling them in the Kubernetes cluster, and enabling asynchronous communication in between. In this paper, we discuss the differences between the monolith and microservice architecture to justify our decision for migration. We describe the methodology for the application's migration and implementation processes, technologies we use for continuous integration and deployment, and we present microservices improved performance results compared with the monolithic application.