A Common transactional architecture for microservices with open API specification

Abstract

The domain of Information Systems (IS) is no longer isolated in modern world, with the high-speed network facilities more applications and sub systems such as management, EDI, CRM are being developed which access different independent sources inside and outside the organization. Nowadays, the microservice architecture is widely utilized in the development industry for creating larger and more intricate applications. A good microservice architecture helps to maintain the interoperability between different Opcos by reducing the cost of interconnectivity. The existing gap in the telecom industry is not having a common standard set of APIs when designing their internal systems which leads to more labor cost and time consuming when integrating them with existing vendors or systems. Telecommunication companies have already identified the importance of having common API sets in their systems. Due to the complexity of those APIs, it will be difficult in catering existing requirements. Several studies have been carried out on similar areas such as blockchain management, e-government portals and event driven architectures on designing an interoperable architecture for dynamic business models. However, most of them are analyzed in architectural level but not in microservice or API level with compatible data model and none of them have shown promising results. This research attempts to explore the importance of an interoperable transaction architecture for microservices by analyzing TM Forum open API specification architecture along with its data model. It lends to propose a microservice based reference implementation and a reference architecture for community wide domains