GenMicro: A Tool for Generating Microservice Architectures with In-Depth Microservice Design

Abstract

MicroService Architecture (MSA) has become an increasingly popular architectural style for distributed and service-based systems. Despite the various facilities offered by existing frameworks, setting up a microservice architecture remains challenging for developers. Also, configuring all the microservices is time-consuming. Several tools have been proposed for generating microservice architectures. For the most part, these tools focus on the basic configuration aspects, leaving the business aspects of each microservice to the developers. Thus, a question arises: How can business elements be integrated into the definition of formalism in microservices architecture alongside the configuration aspects? This study proposes a tool named GenMicro, which is based on a detailed design. It takes into account various elements such as business components, entities, dependencies, or configurations encapsulated within nodes representing microservices, utilizing a model-driven engineering approach to transform them into code models for code generation. The tool has three components: A graphical editor for architectural representation and internal description of each microservice, an intermediate transformation engine to transform the graphical elements into a code model, and a module to refine the code according to the microservice architecture. The ready-to-use Java code generated by GenMicro is compliant with the Spring Cloud Netflix Framework and is deployment-ready.