Runtime models and evolution graphs for the version management of microservice architectures

Microservice architectures focus on developing modular and independent functional units, which can be automatically deployed, enabling agile DevOps. One major challenge is to manage the rapid evolutionary changes in microservices and perform continuous redeployment without interrupting the application execution. The existing solutions provide limited capacities to help software architects model, plan, and perform version management activities. The architects lack a representation of a microservice architecture with versions tracking. In this paper, we propose runtime models that distinguishes the type model from the instance model, and we build up an evolution graph of configuration snapshots of types and instances to allow the traceability of microservice versions and their deployment. We demonstrate our solution with an illustrative application that involves synchronous (RPC calls) and asynchronous (publish-subscribe) interaction within information systems.