Monitoring extensions for component-based distributed software

This paper defines a generic class of monitoring extensions to component-based distributed enterprise software. Introducing a monitoring extension to a legacy application system can be very costly. In this paper, we identify the minimum support for application monitoring within the generic components of a distributed system, necessary for rapid development of new monitoring extensions. Furthermore, this paper offers an approach for design and implementation of monitoring extensions at reduced cost. A framework of basic facilities supporting the monitoring extensions is presented. These facilities handle different aspects critical to the monitoring process, such as ordering of the generated monitoring events, decoupling of the application components from the components of the monitoring extensions, delivery of the monitoring events to multiple consumers, etc.\ud The work presented in this paper is being validated in the prototype of a large distributed system, where a specific monitoring extension is built as a tool for debugging and testing the application behaviour.\u

Guidelines for Testing Microservice-based Applications

Há uma tendência no desenvolvimento de software de adotar uma arquitetura baseada em microserviços. Apesar de vários benefícios como maior modularização, escalabilidade e manutenibilidade, esta abordagem levanta outros desafios para a organização. Ao aplicar este padrão de arquitetura, a estratégia de teste precisa de ser ajustada. Um sistema baseado em microserviços é inerentemente distribuído e pressupõe que os vários serviços estejam em constante comunicação entre si, através de conexões de rede, para responder aos requisitos de negócio. Testar um microserviço por si só é mais fácil, pois este está naturalmente isolado do resto do sistema, mas a execução de testes de integração torna-se mais complexa. A utilização de microserviços também oferece várias opções sobre onde e o que testar. Este trabalho tem o objetivo de estudar, comparar e sistematizar soluções e abordagens atuais para o desenvolvimento de testes em sistemas baseados em microserviços e propor um conjunto de diretrizes, métodos e boas práticas universais para facilitar o seu processo de testagem, ajudando as organizações a produzir testes com qualidade, mais valiosos e com menos custos. De modo a perceber os problemas e desafios enfrentados a testar microserviços, um projeto em forma de prova de conceito (PoC) e utilizando uma arquitetura baseadas em microserviços foi planeado, desenhado e testes, relativos a alguns casos de uso foram investigados. Também foram sugeridos um conjunto de indicadores que pretendem medir a qualidade e valor da estratégia de testes. Para cada indicador foi proposto onde pode ser recolhido, um racional com a explicação do seu propósito e uma escala de medida. Este trabalho concluiu que, apesar da existência de estratégias e frameworks de testes capazes de ajudar as organizações a testar as suas aplicações corretamente, é necessária a mentalidade certa para atingir uma estratégia de testes de qualidade. Deste modo, este trabalho propõe um conjunto de recomendações e boas práticas que promovem a mentalidade correta para desenhar e implementar testes sobre todas as camadas do sistema. São também sugeridos passos a seguir para definir e decompor cenários de teste, e soluções para os vários tipos de testes estudados. Assim, este trabalho pode também ser considerado uma base de conhecimento na área de testes em microserviços e ajudar a acelerar a sua adoção.There’s a trend in software development to adopt a microservice-based architecture. Despite several benefits such as increased modularization, scalability and maintainability, this approach brings other challenges to the table. When applying this architectural pattern, the testing strategy needs to be adapted. A microservice-based application presupposes that the various services that compose the system are communication with each other, across network boundaries, to fulfil business requirements and is inherently distributed. Testing a microservice by itself is easier, as it is naturally isolated from the rest of the system, but integration testing becomes more challenging. Microservices also offer several options about where and what to test. This work focus on studying, comparing, and systemizing current solutions and approaches for testing in microservice-based systems and proposing a set of universal guidelines, methods, and best practices to facilitate microservice-based application testing, helping organizations produce more valuable and quality tests with less costs. To understand the problems and challenges presented by microservices testing, a proof-ofconcept (PoC) project, using a microservice-based architecture, was designed and tests for some use cases were explored. Furthermore, indicators to measure test quality and value were proposed, describing it source, rational and measurement scale. This works concludes that, although many testing approaches and frameworks exist that can help organizations test their applications correctly, they need to be used with the right mindset. To achieved this, this work proposes a set of guidelines and best practices that promote the right mindset for designing and implementation tests at all system layers. It also proposes a workflow for test definition and decomposition, and solutions for the various studied testing types

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

Behavioral types in programming languages

A recent trend in programming language research is to use behav- ioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of large- scale, communication-intensive systems. Behavioral types encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, contracts, and choreography. The successful application of behavioral types requires a solid understanding of several practical aspects, from their represen- tation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to de- sign and monitoring methodologies that take behaviors into account. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of these aspects, which we summarize as the pragmatics of behavioral types

Safe API Evolution in a Microservice Architecture with a Pluggable and Transactionless Solution

In contrast to monolithic system designs, microservice architectures provide greater scala- bility, availability, and delivery by separating the elements of a large project into indepen- dent entities linked through a network of services. Because services are tied to one another via their interfaces, they can only evolve separately if their contracts remain consistent. There is a scarcity of mechanisms for safely evolving and discontinuing functionalities of services. In monolithic system design’s, changing the definition of an element can be accom- plished quickly with the aid of developer tools (such as IDE refactoring toolkits). In distributed systems there is a lack of comparable tools, developers are left with the burden of manually tracking down and resolving problems caused by uncontrolled updates. To ensure that microservices are working properly the general approach is to validate their behaviour through empirical tests. This thesis aims to supplement the conventional approach by providing mechanisms that support the automatic validation of deployment operations, and the evolution of mi- croservice interfaces. It ́s presented a microservice management system that verifies the safety of modifications to service interfaces and that enables the evolution of service con- tracts without impacting consumer services. The system use runtime-generated proxies, that dynamically convert the data sent between services to the format expected by static code, thereby relieving the developer of the need to manually adapt existing services.Em contraste com sistemas tradicionais monoliticos, as arquiteturas de microsserviços permitem grande escalabilidade, disponibilidade e capacidade de entrega, separando os elementos de um grande projeto em entidades independentes ligadas através de uma rede serviços. Como os serviços estão ligados uns aos outros através das suas interfaces, só podem evoluir separadamente se os seus contratos se mantiverem consistentes. Existe uma escassez de mecanismos para evoluir e descontinuar as funcionalidades dos serviços em segurança. Nos sistemas tradicionais monoliticos, a alteração da definição de um elemento pode ser realizada rapidamente com a ajuda de ferramentas automatizadas (tais como kits de ferramentas de refactoring IDE). Em sistemas distribuídos, existe falta de ferramentas comparáveis, os programadores ficam normalmente sobrecarregados com a resolução ma- nual de problemas causados por atualizações e pela validação do correcto funcionamento do sistema através de testes empíricos. O trabalho desenvolvido nesta tese procura complementar a abordagem convencional, fornecendo mecanismos que suportam a validação das operações de deployment. É apre- sentado um sistema de gestão de microsserviços que verifica a segurança das modificações das interfaces de serviço e a evolução dos contratos. A abordagem utiliza proxies, que convertem dinamicamente os dados enviados entre serviços ao formato esperado pelo código de serviço estático, minimizando a intervenção manual do programador

Quality Engineering for Agile and DevOps on the Cloud and Edge

Today's software projects include enhancements, fixes, and patches need to be delivered almost on a daily basis to clients. Weekly and daily releases are pretty much the norm and sit alongside larger feature upgrades and quarterly releases. Software delivery has to be more agile now than ever before. Companies that were, in the past, experimenting with agile based delivery models, are now looking to scale it to enterprise grade. This shifts the need from the ability to build and execute tests rapidly, to using different means, technologies and procedures to provide rapid and insightful validation sequences and tests to establish quality withing the manufacturing cycle. This book addresses the need of effectively embedding quality engineering throughout the agile development cycle thus addressing the need for enterprise scale high quality agile development

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

Architectures v/s Microservices

As it evolves, technology has always found a better way to build applications and improve their efficiency. New techniques have been learned by adapting old technologies and observing how markets shift towards new trends to satisfy their customers and shareholders. By taking Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and evolving techniques in cloud computing, Web 2.0 emerged with a new pattern for designing an architecture evolved from the conventional monolithic approach known as microservice architecture (MSA). This new pattern develops an application by breaking the substantial use into a group of smaller applications, which run on their processes and communicate through an API. This style of application development is suitable for many infrastructures, especially within a cloud environment. These new patterns advanced to satisfy the concepts of domain-driven, continuous integration, and automated infrastructure more effectively. MSA has created a way to develop and deploy small scalable applications, which allows enterprise-level applications to dynamically adjust to their resources. This paper discusses what that architecture is, what makes it necessary, what factors affect best-fit architecture choices, how microservices-based architecture has evolved, and what factors are driving service-based architectures, in addition to comparing SOA and microservice. By analyzing a few popular architectures, the factors which help in choosing the architecture design will be compared with the MSA to show the benefits and challenges that may arise as an enterprise shifts their developing architecture to microservices