Business Driven Microservice Design An Enterprise Ontology Based Approach to API Specifications

As technology is evolving rapidly and market demand is changing quicker than ever, many are trying to implement service orientation and adopt market standards to improve adaptivity. A microservice architecture makes applications easier to scale and faster to develop, enabling innovation and accelerating time-to-market for new features. The question then arises how to design a manageable and stable set of microservices that is sufficient for the business. In this paper we systematically deduce an algorithm to derive a set of microservices, expressed according to the OpenAPI standard, from the ontological model of an enterprise, that is stable by nature, sufficient for the business, and based on units of clear size. This algorithm has the DEMO operating cycle at its heart and has been evaluated with the real-life Social Housing case at ICTU by creating a SwaggerHub implementation. Further research should clarify the role of implementation choices in the algorithm.