Migrating to Cloud-Native Architectures Using Microservices: An Experience Report

Migration to the cloud has been a popular topic in industry and academia in recent years. Despite many benefits that the cloud presents, such as high availability and scalability, most of the on-premise application architectures are not ready to fully exploit the benefits of this environment, and adapting them to this environment is a non-trivial task. Microservices have appeared recently as novel architectural styles that are native to the cloud. These cloud-native architectures can facilitate migrating on-premise architectures to fully benefit from the cloud environments because non-functional attributes, like scalability, are inherent in this style. The existing approaches on cloud migration does not mostly consider cloud-native architectures as their first-class citizens. As a result, the final product may not meet its primary drivers for migration. In this paper, we intend to report our experience and lessons learned in an ongoing project on migrating a monolithic on-premise software architecture to microservices. We concluded that microservices is not a one-fit-all solution as it introduces new complexities to the system, and many factors, such as distribution complexities, should be considered before adopting this style. However, if adopted in a context that needs high flexibility in terms of scalability and availability, it can deliver its promised benefits

Microservices Architecture Enables DevOps: an Experience Report on Migration to a Cloud-Native Architecture

This article reports on experiences and lessons learned during incremental migration and architectural refactoring of a commercial mobile back end as a service to microservices architecture. It explains how the researchers adopted DevOps and how this facilitated a smooth migration

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

Polyratings Website Update

Polyratings is a well known website amongst Cal Poly students. Over the past 14 years it has been in existence the site has been viewed 2.5 million times. This is a drastic number because the average student population on campus every year nears 20,000. This being said, when class registration came around every quarter there was always talk about the Polyratings scores for professors. However, with this talk also came much negativity towards the site. The problem that we found was that everyone needed Polyratings for help with class searching, but were also very dissatisfied with the website. The main problems with the website were that the User Interface (UI) was outdated and cumbersome, as well as there being some troubles with the data in the website. Our team knew that there were problems with the website, but the first problem that needed to be solved was that we needed to get into contact with the person maintaining the site. We had to find the man behind Polyratings. Our senior capstone professor, Dr. Janzen, was able to direct us to the email of one, J. Paul Reed (Paul). From this point forward the project took its roots

An Analysis of Multi-domain Command and Control and the Development of Software Solutions through DevOps Toolsets and Practices

Multi-Domain Command and Control (MDC2) is the exercise of command and control over forces in multiple operational domains (namely air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace) in order to produce synergistic effects in the battlespace, and enhancing this capability has become a major focus area for the United States Air Force (USAF). In order to meet demands for MDC2 software, solutions need to be acquired and/or developed in a timely manner, information technology infrastructure needs to be adaptable to new software requirements, and user feedback needs to drive iterative updates to fielded software. In commercial organizations, agile software development methodologies and concepts such as DevOps have been implemented to meet these demands. However, the USAF has been slow to adopt modern agile software development concepts such as DevOps in favor of traditional software development lifecycles and large contracts that can go nearly a decade without any value being released to the users. This work explores MDC2 software use cases and aims to show that MDC2 software can be successfully developed using modern agile software development practices in a timely manner