Multi-party Contract Management for Microservices

This paper discusses the necessary steps and means for ensuring the successful deployment and execution of software components referred to as microservices on top of platforms referred to as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, clouds, and edges. These steps and means are packaged into formal documents known in the literature as contracts. Because of the multi-dimensional nature of deploying and executing microservices, contracts are specialized into discovery, deployment, and collaboration types, capturing each specific aspect of the completion of these contracts. This completion is associated with a set of Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters that are monitored allowing to identify potential deviations between what has been agreed upon and what has really happened. To demonstrate the technical doability of contracts, a system is implemented using different datasets that support experiments related to assessing the impact of the number of microservices and platforms on the performance of the system.