A Planning Approach to Migrating Domain-specific Legacy Systems into Service Oriented Architecture

The planning work prior to implementing an SOA migration project is very important for its success. Up to now, most of this kind of work has been manual work. An SOA migration planning approach based on intelligent information processing methods is addressed to semi-automate the manual work. This thesis will investigate the principle research question: “How can we obtain SOA migration planning schemas (semi-) automatically instead of by traditional manual work in order to determine if legacy software systems should be migrated to SOA computation environment?”. The controlled experiment research method has been adopted for directing research throughout the whole thesis. Data mining methods are used to analyse SOA migration source and migration targets. The mined information will be the supplementation of traditional analysis results. Text similarity measurement methods are used to measure the matching relationship between migration sources and migration targets. It implements the quantitative analysis of matching relationships instead of common qualitative analysis. Concretely, an association rule and sequence pattern mining algorithms are proposed to analyse legacy assets and domain logics for establishing a Service model and a Component model. These two algorithms can mine all motifs with any min-support number without assuming any ordering. It is better than the existing algorithms for establishing Service models and Component models in SOA migration situations. Two matching strategies based on keyword level and superficial semantic levels are described, which can calculate the degree of similarity between legacy components and domain services effectively. Two decision-making methods based on similarity matrix and hybrid information are investigated, which are for creating SOA migration planning schemas. Finally a simple evaluation method is depicted. Two case studies on migrating e-learning legacy systems to SOA have been explored. The results show the proposed approach is encouraging and applicable. Therefore, the SOA migration planning schemas can be created semi-automatically instead of by traditional manual work by using data mining and text similarity measurement methods

Service-oriented mobility of java code in web services-based architectures

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologias da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaSoftware mobility consists of providing software components, the ability to migrate to a remote host with the purpose of interacting locally. In other words, this technology enables computations to be transferred from the current machine to a remote one. This powerful enhancement embodied in a traditional network fairly raises security concerns. For now, we believe that software mobility paradigm is confined to environments with bases of trust such as local area networks or middleware layers where security issues can be better controlled. Service-oriented computations reorganize the network architecture in the form of services, where components are more easily integrated, modified and removed. They have the ability to cooperate between them regardless the programming language used in their development. In addition, service-oriented computing is a widely accepted technology for the implementation of distributed applications, namely middleware. The work developed in this thesis consists of instantiating a model which combines software mobility and service-oriented paradigms as proposed by Paulino [20]. In this model, migrating sessions take advantage of the resources of a service-oriented network, creating thus an environment where the migration is modeled in terms of services instead of network nodes abstractions. In the instantiated model, we aim to apply the migration of Java programs in a context of a service-oriented architecture developed with Web services. This application comprises of a middleware layer that runs between the source program and the Web services technologies, and whose interface is the result of the mapping of the operations defined in the model. The evaluation performed to the instantiated model allows us to identify situations in which component migration to the server to interact locally is more advantageous in comparison to remote interacting with it

Factors Affecting Success in Migration of Legacy Systems to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) - Shared Experiences from Five Case Companies

Background: The term ‘legacy systems’ refers to existing Information Systems that have been deployed in the past and have been running critical business processes within an enterprise in its current IT architecture. Based on their important role, legacy systems are considered the heart of a company’s operating enterprise system and therefore are of significant business value to the company. Therefore IT architects have not neglected the value these existing assets can bring to the adoption of service-oriented architecture and have been studying different methods and factors to migrate the legacy investments into the new architecture and take advantage of their business value. However, not in all cases has the process of migrating legacy systems into SOA been successful. In fact, the level of success in adapting the legacy systems in a company with the new service-oriented architecture is dependant on some factors which vary from one legacy infrastructure and series of business processes to another. There is no quick fix to transforming the existing legacy assets which highlights the fact that considering the right factors to reach legacy system migration success in a specific company is of key value. Therefore, we hereby studied the factors influencing success of migrating these legacy investments into SOA in five different companies which include a Large European Bank, SAS, a Large globally-known Company in Sweden, Sandvik AB and a large UK Bank. Purpose: To identify factors affecting successful migration of legacy systems into SOA in five companies. Method: The main adopted research method in this study has been interviews for different case studies. Through separate interviews, critical success factors of migrating legacy systems into SOA have been collected and identified in each case. Finally collected results are analyzed and presented as the recognized factors affecting successful migration of legacy assets into SOA in five different enterprises with their own Information System infrastructures. Conclusion: The success factors identified include potential of legacy systems for being migrated, strategy of migration, SOA governance, the business process of the company, budgeting and resources, legacy architecture, close monitoring, dependence on commercial products, information architecture, testing and technical skills of the personnel. Out of all these factors, only three factors have been applied and mentioned by all the case companies in this study, which are the potential of legacy systems for being migrated into SOA, strategy of migration and SOA Governance

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

Building an Understanding of the Service-Oriented Architecture: One University\u27s Experience with Implementing Microsoft\u27s .NET Platform

A paradigm shift is on the horizon for the way computer applications are designed, developed and deployed. The focus is shifting away from the development structure of ‘one program equals one application’ to one application made up of a collection of small functional components referred to as services. While the technology is still evolving, it is imperative that information systems programs become proactive in integrating the concepts of the Service Oriented Architecture into their curriculum and providing exposure to its associated tools in the classroom. However, migrating to these new technologies is not trivial. This paper provides an overview of one university’s experience of introducing this new paradigm into the college classroom though utilizing Microsoft’s .NET environment