Lessons Learned from Developing a Microservice Based Mobile Location-Based Crowdsourcing Platform

Research in Mobile Location-Based Crowdsourcing is hindered by a marked lack of real-world data. The development of a standardized, lightweight, easily deployable, modular, composable, and most of all, scalable experimentation framework would go a long way in facilitating such research. Conveniently, these are all salient characteristics of systems developed using a microservices approach. We propose QRowdsource - a MLBC experimentation framework built using a distributed services architecture. In this paper, we discuss the design and development of QRowdsource, from the decomposition of functional components to the orchestration of services within the framework. We also take a look at how the advantages and disadvantages of using a microservices approach translate to our specific use case and deliberate over a number of lessons learned while developing the experimentation framework.