Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations

MergePoint: A Graphical Web-App for merging HTTP-Endpoints and IoT-Platform Models

More and more devices are connected to Internet of Things Platforms in various application domains. The resulting device integration effort is moderated by the concrete integration syntax and the technical abilities of the device integrator. Therefore, researchers from various communities have been investigating and designing component coupling architectures to achieve interoperability for more than 30 years. Emerging Smart Home scenarios challenges classical integration approaches as no single formal integration standard exists. In this paper we introduce a reference architecture called MergePoint that automates HTTP-Endpoint integration with smart home platforms such as openHAB in a plug-and-play manner. Based on a prototypical system implementation, our empirical evaluation demonstrates that average integration time can be reduced by 78% and average tool usability score is increased by 65% compared to textual integration approaches. MergePoint can serve as a reference implementation for practitioners that want to automate the integration between HTTP-Endpoints and IoT Platform Models

Conceptualizing a framework for cyber-physical systems of systems development and deployment

ABSTRACT Cyber-physical systems (CPS) refer to the next generation of embedded ICT systems that are interconnected, collaborative and that provide users and businesses with a wide range of smart applications and services. Software in CPS applications ranges from small systems to large systems, aka. Systems of Systems (SoS), such as smart grids and cities. CPSoS require managing massive amounts of data, being aware of their emerging behavior, and scaling out to progressively evolve and add new systems. Cloud computing supports processing and storing massive amounts of data, hosting and delivering services, and configuring selfprovisioned resources. Therefore, cloud computing is the natural candidate to solve CPSoS needs. However, the diversity of platforms and the low-level cloud programming models make difficult to find a common solution for the development and deployment of CPSoS. This paper presents the architectural foundations of a cloud-centric framework for automating the development and deployment of CPSoS service applications to converge towards a common open service platform for CPSoS applications. This framework relies on the well-known qualities of the microservices architecture style, the autonomic computing paradigm, and the model-driven software development approach. Its implementation and validation is on-going at two European and national projects