Decoupling Adaptive Control in TeaStore

TL;DR

This paper explores methods to decouple self-adaptive control logic from microservice applications, focusing on system-wide consistency, planning, and modularity, and proposes a multi-tiered architecture combining various approaches.

Contribution

It analyzes architectural techniques like cloud-native Operators and legacy programming to improve decoupling of self-adaptive control in microservices.

Findings

Different approaches trade off between expressiveness and control.

Combining methods can enhance modularity and system-wide consistency.

A multi-tiered architecture can integrate multiple decoupling strategies.

Abstract

The Adaptable TeaStore specification provides a microservice-based case study for implementing self-adaptation through a control loop. We argue that implementations of this specification should be informed by key properties of self-adaptation: system-wide consistency (coordinated adaptations across replicas), planning (executing an adaptation until appropriate conditions are met), and modularity (clean integration of adaptation logic). In this implementation discussion paper, we examine how software architectural methods, the cloud-native Operator pattern, and legacy programming language techniques can decouple self-adaptive control logic from the TeaStore application. We analyze the trade-offs that these different approaches make between fine-grained expressive adaptation and system-wide control, and highlight when reuse of adaptation strategies is most effective. Our analysis suggests that these approaches are not mutually exclusive but can be combined into a multi-tiered architecture for self-adaptive microservices.