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Evaluation of SOA-Based Web Services and Microservices Architecture Using Complexity Metrics

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Abstract

Distributed systems have evolved rapidly as the demand for independent design and deployment of software applications has increased. Web services and microservices are two styles of designing distributed applications based on the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). After the evolution of microservices, software architects are in chaos, whether to adopt microservices over web services. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no empirical work done in the literature for comparing both web services and microservices architecture in terms of the coupling principle of SOA. In this paper, a service graph-based approach is proposed to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of microservices architecture when compared with web services. Loose coupling is used as a perspective for evaluation, and we have chosen two case study applications to evaluate them in terms of coupling. From the results, it is observed that microservices has lesser coupling values than web services.

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Notes

  1. Fowler, Lewis . Microservices a definition of this new architectural term. Website: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html. 2014 Mar:22.

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Raj, V., Sadam, R. Evaluation of SOA-Based Web Services and Microservices Architecture Using Complexity Metrics. SN COMPUT. SCI. 2, 374 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-021-00767-6

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