SWITCH workbench: A novel approach for the development and deployment of time-critical microservice-based cloud-native applications

Time-critical applications, such as early warning systems or live event broadcasting, present particular challenges. They have hard limits on Quality of Service constraints that must be maintained, despite network fluctuations and varying peaks of load. Consequently, such applications must adapt elastically on-demand, and so must be capable of reconfiguring themselves, along with the underlying cloud infrastructure, to satisfy their constraints. Software engineering tools and methodologies currently do not support such a paradigm. In this paper, we describe a framework that has been designed to meet these objectives, as part of the EU SWITCH project. SWITCH offers a flexible co-programming architecture that provides an abstraction layer and an underlying infrastructure environment, which can help to both specify and support the life cycle of time-critical cloud native applications. We describe the architecture, design and implementation of the SWITCH components and describe how such tools are applied to three time-critical real-world use cases.