Implementation and evaluation of a container-based software architecture

Recent advances in fields such as Cloud Computing, Web Systems, Internet of Things and Distributed NoSQL DBMS are enabling the development of innovative enterprise information systems that significantly increase the productivity of end users and developers. The aim of this thesis is to explore the new opportunities that these new technologies are bringing to the enterprise world. The new opportunities are explored by investigating the scenario of a medium-sized worldwide-trading company, Fiorital S.p.A. The thesis presents the design of a software architecture for the future information system of the company. The architecture is based on the usage of the Container technology and of the Microservice architectural style. Containers have empowered the usage of Microservices architectures by being lightweight, providing fast start-up times, and having low overhead. Candidate technologies for the implementation of the proposed software architecture are singled out, and the selection rationale is presented. This thesis provides an evaluation of both the candidate architecture and the technologies through the implementation of a prototype and the application of synthetic workloads that mimic stressful use scenarios. The results show that, in spite of the relative immaturity of some of the candidate technologies, the information system's candidate architecture is appropriate and that a company like Fiorital would considerably benefit from it.