Development of an efficient method of integration between collaborative applications and cloud services

Resumen

Currently, organizations face the need to create scalable applications in an agile way that impacts new forms of production and business organization. The traditional monolithic architecture no longer meets the needs of scalability and rapid development. Today there is a trend in the software development community towards cloud computing. In fact, cloud platforms are the preferred operating model for modern applications. Microservices Architecture (MSA) is presented as a modern, scalable and sustainable approach to software development that allows taking advantage of the benefits obtained with cloud computing. This type of architecture separates large systems into small functional units to provide better modularity. In addition, the architecture allows the development and testing of individual services as separate containers that allow a seamless deployment on the available network. However, the implementation of microservices still encounters several challenges, such as the consumption of time and computational resources, scalability, orchestration, organization problems, and several further technical complications. Although there are procedures that facilitate the migration from a monolithic architecture to micro-services, none of them accurately quantifies performance differences. In fact, scientific knowledge on how to manage the migration from monolithic to microservices architectures and collaborative web application designs that provides quick and easyto-implement online editing is scarce. This research evaluates the performance of an application that runs in a monolithic structure compared to another of microservices. In addition, we design and implement a collaborative architecture based on microservices using containers assembled in the cloud. Finally, we designed and implemented a suitable load balancer for a collaborative web application (Etherpad) in a microservices-based architecture. Our proposals contribute significantly towards a microservices-based distributed implementation of Etherpad.