A Cloud Computing web-based application for Smart Farming based on microservices architecture

The agriculture sector is envisioning a revolution of traditional farming supported by Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and Cloud Computing is one of them. This tendency is called Smart Farming and promises to boost productivity while reducing production costs and chemical inputs. Cloud Computing aims to provide the necessary resources and the central orchestration of all devices involved in a Smart Farming scenario. To achieve high scalability, usability and performance in Cloud-based applications, we have to move from a monolithic development approach to microservices architecture using cutting edge technologies like containerisation. This paper presents a Smart Farming application based on Cloud Computing that promises to provide useful information to agronomists and farmers to support their decisions based on measurements from ground sensors and images captured from UAVs or ground cameras. Our implementation is based on microservices architecture using Docker Containers as the virtualisation technology. Each microservice runs on a different container and communicates through a RESTful API interface. The proposed architecture is highly scalable in future upgrades and promises high performance and security.