Towards Transforming an Industrial Automation System from Monolithic to Microservices

Container technology enables designers to build (micro)service-oriented systems with on-demand scalability and availability easily, provided the original system has been well-modularized to begin with. Industry automation applications, built a long time ago, aim to adopt this technology to become more flexible and ready to be a part of the internet of thing based next-generation industrial system. In this paper, we share our work-in-progress experience of transforming a complex, distributed industrial automation system to a microservice based containerized architecture. We propose a containerized architecture of the "to-be" system and observe that despite being distributed, the "as-is" system tend to follow a monolithic architecture with strong coupling among the participating components. Consequently it becomes difficult to achieve the proposed microservice based architecture without a significant change. We also discuss the workload handling, resource utilization and reliability aspects of the "to-be" architecture using a prototype implementation.