Monitoring Data Distribution and Exploitation in a Global-Scale Microservice Artefact Observatory

Reusable microservice artefacts are often deployed as black or grey boxes, with little concern for their properties and quality, beyond a syntactical interface description. This leads application developers to chaotic and opportunistic assumptions about how a composite application will behave in the real world. Systematically analyzing and tracking these publicly available artefacts will grant much needed predictability to microservice-based deployments. By establishing a distributed observatory and knowledge base, it is possible to track microservice repositories and analyze the artefacts reliably, and provide insights on their properties and quality to developers and researchers alike. This position paper argues for a federated research infrastructure with consensus voting among participants to establish and preserve ground truth about the insights.