Microservices are a new trend in application development. They allow for breaking down big monolithic applications into smaller parts that can be updated and scaled independently. However, there are still many uncertainties when it comes to the standards of the microservices, which can lead to costly and time consuming creations or migrations of system architectures. One of the more common ways of deploying microservices is through the use of containers and container orchestration platform, most commonly the open-source platform Kubernetes. In order to speed up the creation or migration it is possible to use a reference architecture that acts as a blueprint to follow when designing and implementing the architecture. Using a reference architecture will lead to more standardized architectures, which in turn are most time and cost effective.

This thesis proposes such a reference architecture to be used when designing microservice architectures. The goal of the reference architecture is to provide a product that meets the needs and expectations of companies that already use microservices or might adopt microservices in the future.

In order to achieve the goal of the thesis, the work was divided into three main phases. First, a questionnaire was conducted and sent out to be answered by experts in the area of microservices or system architectures. Second, literature studies were made on the state of the art and practice of reference architectures and microservice architectures. Third, studies were made on the Kubernetes components found in the Kubernetes documentation, which were evaluated and chosen depending on how well they reflected the needs of the companies.

This thesis finally proposes a reference architecture with components chosen according to the needs and expectations of the companies found from the questionnaire.