Analysis, Evaluation, and Assessment for Containerizing an Industry Automation Software

Container-based virtualization is becoming a preferred choice to deploy services since it is lightweight and supports on-demand scalability as well as availability. The Process Automation Industry has accepted this technology to make their applications service oriented. However, container-based microservice architecture is effective only when the original software strictly followed modularity principles during its design. In this article, we share our learning of converting a distributed software to a microservice-based architecture using containers. Though the existing system has a modular design and deployed as distributed components, analysis of the current architecture shows that the application is monolithic (though modularized) and the components are strongly coupled in an indirect manner. As a result, it turns to be impossible to attain microservice-based architecture without changing the architecture. Next, we propose a microservice-based containerized TO-BE architecture of the application, and demonstrate that this TO-BE architecture does not incur any significant overhead. Finally, we propose a set of recommendations that the practitioners can follow to convert a monolithic application to a containerized architecture.