Supporting Transparent Distributed Transactions Among Containerized RESTful Microservices

In modern software systems, supporting transactions across multiple services presents a significant challenge. Among the various interaction approaches, the RESTful architectural style stands out as a popular choice. With the rise of microservice architecture and the growing popularity of hosting microservices in containers, the need for efficient and scalable transaction management mechanisms for containerized RESTful services has become increasingly important. This paper introduces a novel approach that transparently enhances existing non-transactional containerized RESTful services with transaction capabilities. The main idea is to implement transaction handling logic in a sidecar container, which can be attached to service containers as needed. Unlike other distributed transaction mechanisms for RESTful services, this approach eliminates the need to modify both the service logic and the communication protocol (HTTP). This research demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed method through case studies and experiments. Overall, this approach offers a seamless and efficient solution for integrating transaction management into containerized microservices.