Developing a Process in Architecting Microservice Infrastructure with Docker, Kubernetes, and Istio

Abstract: As an application usage grows, its owner scales up vertically by replacing old machines with more powerful ones. This methodology is expensive and leads to resource waste. In response to the business needs, internet giants have developed the microservice architecture, which lets developers divide up their application into smaller units that can be hosted on multiple machines, thus enabling horizontal scale up. We propose a triphasic incremental process to transform a traditional application into a microservice application that guarantees stability during the operation. Then we demonstrated such methodology in a prototype microservice application based on an existing monolithic application. First, the developer splits a monolithic application into atomic services and aggregated services. Second, these services are packaged, containerized, and then deployed on Kubernetes. During this stage, Istio is deployed on the Kubernetes cluster to establish pod level communications, delegate traffic flows and filter requests, and enable the autoscaler. Other external add-ons, such as database connections, are defined in service entry. In the last stage, we developed an algorithm guideline to minimize inter-service calls by compiling all needed calls into a list and perform one finalized call. Although it increases memory usage, it avoided the wait time incurred during interservice calls. We then investigated managing configurations using config maps, recommended a pipeline being developed to perform automatic rollover.