Reactive Microservices for the Internet of Things: A case study in Fog Computing

The Future Internet will be able to connect most of the objects that are not yet connected on the current Internet. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an important part of the Future Internet and involves connectivity between several physical and virtual objects, allowing the emergence of new services and applications. These intelligent objects, along with their tasks, constitute domain-specific applications (vertical markets), while ubiquitous and analytic services form independent domain services (horizontal markets). The development of these applications and services in these markets brings challenges such as deployment, scalability, integration, interoperability, mobility and performance. Recent research indicates that Microservices has been successfully applied by companies such as Netflix and SoundCloud to address some of these issues in their cloud computing applications. However, in the field of IoT, the use of Microservices to deal with these challenges still presents unresolved issues. In this paper, we present a reactive Microservices architecture and apply it in a Fog Computing case study to investigate these challenges at the edge of the network. Finally, we evaluate our proposal from the perspective of performance of Microservices provided by intelligent objects (IoT gateways) at the edge of the network.