Enabling centralized access to a reactive architecture for hardware control systems

This study describes the process of introducing an API gateway with cross-cutting features into a reactive architecture. The aim of this implementation is to introduce these cross-cutting features into the architecture without changing the services of the reactive architecture. Examples of cross-cutting features are: security, tracing, monitoring and request composition. The target design required the translation of an asynchronous protocol to a synchronous protocol. This was achieved by identifying conversations based on sequence diagrams of current communications in the architecture of Thales. A proof of concept implementation was created to verify the findings of this study. In this implementation an API transformation service was introduced which transform the customer-facing synchronous API to the internal asynchronous message based communication. In this proof of concept implementation the cross-cutting features were successfully implemented without any changes needed to the services in the reactive architecture. Benchmark tests showed a promising performance of the implemented API gateway with cross-cutting features.