RAMSES: An Exemplar for Engineering Self-Adaptive Microservice Applications

This paper introduces RAMSES, an exemplar tailored for both practitioners and researchers working on self-adaptive microservice applications. By emphasizing a clear separation of concerns between the application and its adaptation logic, RAMSES realizes a reusable autonomic manager that implements a MAPE-K feedback loop whose components are microservices themselves. Its primary focus lies in addressing user-defined QoS attributes at runtime, like availability and performance. To illustrate its usage, we provide a practical example showing its mechanics in an e-food microservice application. Initial experiments indicate the advantages of utilizing RAMSES, as shown by a comparative analysis of the quality properties of a microservice application with and without self-adaptation.