Georg Schwarz
Personal Milestone: I defended my PhD Thesis about Microservices

Personal Milestone: I defended my PhD Thesis about Microservices

research microservices

A journey comes to an end. After years of research, writing, and countless revisions, I successfully defended my dissertation titled “A Theory of Microservice Integration”.

Dissertation Thesis

📄 Download the full dissertation (PDF)

Citation:

Schwarz, G.-D. "A Theory of Microservice Integration."
Doctoral Thesis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2025.
https://doi.org/10.25593/open-fau-2443

License: © 2025 Georg Schwarz. All rights reserved.

Besides connecting my publications into a bigger theme, the thesis contains results that have not undergone peer-review yet:

  1. A case study evaluating the overall handbook I created during my research (Chapter 5.2).
  2. An action research study with more insights towards contract testing in microservice-based projects (Chapters 7.3 and 7.4).

The Research

My dissertation focuses on understanding how microservices integrate with each other and their surrounding systems. Over the course of this journey, I realized microservices aren’t just about REST APIs and message queues. It’s about the full picture: technical, organizational, and social dimensions that make microservice architectures work (or fail).

If you’re interested in the research itself, you can find summaries of several papers that emerged from this work in my research posts.

Thank You

Writing and defending a PhD thesis feels like a very individual effort, but the way there certainly is not.

I want to thank my defense committee:

  • Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, my supervisor, for giving me the freedom to develop my own research directions—and for his trust that never wavered, even when our papers faced initial rejections
  • Prof. Dr. António Rito Silva, for serving as second reviewer and traveling all the way from Portugal
  • Dr. Georg Fischer, for his role as external reviewer
  • Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Kapitza, for chairing the committee

The defense committee

I’m grateful to my colleagues at the Professorship for Open-Source Software at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Many of you have become dear friends. Working together on the JValue research project, developing visions and software, gave me the necessary balance to make it through the long feedback cycles of academic publishing.

Thanks also to all the students I supervised, and to everyone from industry who spent their valuable time supporting my research. I learned a lot from each of you. An

I hope I will have the chance to work with some of you in the future!

Finally, I want to thank my family, friends, and Lena for their unwavering support throughout this journey.

What’s Next?

The PhD is done, but the work continues. I remain passionate about distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and helping teams build software that actually works in production. Stay tuned for more personal insights and practical experiences.

#PhDone 🎓