Microservices-based Approach for a Collaborative Business Process Management Cloud Platform

Abstract

Nowadays, as a result of the adoption of new Internet technologies like cloud computing and emerging business models, organizations are able to establish collaborative networks for executing Collaborative Business Processes (CBPs) in a flexible way. Current approaches of Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs) for implementing and executing CBPs have shortcomings, not only related to the services offered, but also about issues typical of the technological solution chosen, such as portability, elasticity, and privacy when they are cloud-based. Portability refers to the dependency that is created due to the heterogeneity of the services offered by different cloud providers, elasticity defines the degree to which a system is able to adapt to workload changes by provisioning and de-provisioning resources in an autonomic manner, and privacy refers to sensitive information that is expected to be hidden from others. Then, the purpose of this work is to define an adequate cloud architecture for a CBPs management platform which faces these issues. To do so, starting from a definition of a cloud platform architecture that solves (almost all) the shortcomings for the CBPs services offered, an enhancement making use of the microservices paradigm is proposed, overcoming the identified difficulties.