Automated Database Schema Evolution in Microservices Applications

Microservices architecture has emerged as a dominant model for designing cloud-based applications. In this architecture, modular and heterogeneous services, independently deployed and sometimes geo-distributed, dynamically scale and interact with each other to respond to user requests. Typically, each service has its own database(s) and shares information through APIs calls.
Nowadays, developers face a series of challenges in building, deploying, and operating current and future microservices architecture on the cloud continuum.
Particularly, facilitating software evolution is one of the main motivations for adopting a microservices architecture. Paradoxically, from a database point of view, recent surveys reveal that database schema evolution remains among the most pressing data management challenges for microservices architecture developers. While there are many tools available in the literature for supporting the evolution of microservices architecture, none of them is specifically designed to address the problem of database schema evolution.
The primary objective of this PhD thesis is to provide developers with a set of effective and efficient tools for automatically supporting database schema evolution in microservices architecture, thereby reducing their burden in cloud-based applications evolution.
This PhD thesis could be considered as the software and data engineering part of the RAINDROP project.