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

Extensible Architectures: The Strategic Value of Service Oriented Architecture in Banking

Information and communication technology (ICT) has helped to drive increasingly intense global competition. In turn, this intensity increases the need for flexibility and rapid changeability in ICT to support strategies that depend on organizational agility. We report a comparative, cross-cultural case study of the implementation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) at a Scandinavian bank and a Swiss bank. The strategic rewards in the adoption of SOA appear to go beyond marketplace issues of ICT capability acquisition, and unexpectedly arise in the creation of an extensible organizational ICT architecture. The extensibility of the ICT architecture that results from the adoption of SOA provides potential for greater organizational agility (and thereby competitiveness)

SOA and BPM, a Partnership for Successful Organizations

In order to stay effective and competitive, companies have to be able to adapt themselves to permanent market requirements, to improve constantly their business process, to act as flexible and proactive economic agents. To achieve these goals, the IT systems within the organization have to be standardized and integrated, in order to provide fast and reliable data access to users both inside and outside the company. A proper system architecture for integrating company’s IT assets is a service oriented one. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an IT architectural style that allows integration of the company’s business as linked, repeatable tasks called services. A subject closely related to SOA is Business Process Management (BPM), an approach that aims to improve business processes. The paper also presents some aspects of this topic, as well as the relationship between SOA and BPM. They complement each other and help companies improve their business performance.Information Systems, SOA, Web Services, BPM

Monitoring SOA Applications with SOOM Tools: A Competitive Analysis

Background: Monitoring systems decouple monitoring functionality from application and infrastructure layers and provide a set of tools that can invoke operations on the application to be monitored. Objectives: Our monitoring system is a powerful yet agile solution that is able to online observe and manipulate SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) applications. The basic monitoring functionality is implemented via lightweight components inserted into SOA frameworks thereby keeping the monitoring impact minimal. Methods/Approach: Our solution is software that hides the complexity of SOA applications being monitored via an architecture where its designated components deal with specific SOA aspects such as distribution and communication. Results: We implement an application-level and end-to-end monitoring with the end user experience in focus. Our tools are connected to a single monitoring system which provides consistent operations, resolves concurrent requests, and abstracts away the underlying mechanisms that cater for the SOA paradigm. Conclusions: Due to its flexible architecture and design our monitoring tools are capable of monitoring SOA application in Cloud environments without significant modifications. In comparisons with related systems we proved that our agile approaches are the areas where our monitoring system excels

Size Matters: Microservices Research and Applications

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1706.0735

Mikropalveluiden testauskäytännöt julkisen sektorin projekteissa

Online services are constantly evolving, which makes service maintainability challenging. This has led to micro service architecture, where big applications are split into smaller services in order to improve applications' maintainability, scalability, and flexibility. However, splitting a single process application into multiple services causes the testing process to be more challenging. This Master's thesis is exploring these testing problems in a micro service context and finding practical guidance for the test implementation. Moreover, this Master's thesis focuses on public sector software projects. Public sector software projects are clearly predefined and the provider has open information about the project's needs. Thus, the project has a clear goal and known boundaries right from the beginning. The research approach for this study is an exploratory multiple case study consisting of three case projects. The data of the case projects were collected through semi-structural interviews and version history commit analysis. The results of this study present a set of successful practices and recommendations for taking testing into account during a micro service oriented agile development process. Successful testing requires monitoring of the project's maturity level to focus testing resources at the right time. Additionally, the case projects brought up practical testing guidance, such as understanding of the common testing responsibility, the importance of peer review, and the value of assigning a specific tester after the project has reached its end-to-end testing phase.Web-palvelut kehittyvät jatkuvasti, mikä vaikeuttaa palveluiden ylläpitoa. Yhtenä ratkaisuna on palvelun pilkkominen osiin mikropalveluiksi. Palvelun pilkkominen edistää palvelun ylläpitoa, skaalattavuutta ja joustavuutta. Toisaalta palvelun pilkkominen mikropalveluiksi vaikeuttaa testausprosessia. Tämä diplomityö tutkii mikropalveluiden testausprosessiin liittyviä ongelmia ja etsii käytännönläheistä ohjeistuista testien toteuttamiseen mikropalveluympäristössä. Diplomityö keskittyy julkisen sektorin mikropalveluprojekteihin, koska kaikki tässä diplomityössä käytetyt tutkimusprojektit ovat julkisen sektorin hallinnoimia. Julkisen sektorin ohjelmistoprojektit ovat selkeästi esimääriteltyjä ja projektien aineisto on avoimesti saatavilla. Tämän takia projekteilla on selkeä päämäärä ja tunnetut rajat heti projektin alussa. Tutkimusmenetelmänä käytettiin tutkivaa case study -menetelmää. Tutkimus sisälsi kolme tutkimuskohdetta. Tutkimusdata kerättiin osittain jäsennetyillä kontekstuaalisilla haastatteluilla ja ohjelmistokoodin versiohallinnan historian analyysillä. Tuloksena syntyi kokoelma hyväksi todettuja käytäntöjä ja suosituksia, jotka auttavat ottamaan testauksen huomioon mikropalvelun iteratiivisessa ohjelmistokehitysprosessissa. Suositeltaviksi testauskäytännöiksi havaittiin projektin maturiteetin tarkkaileminen, että testauksen resursointi voidaan tehdä oikeaan aikaan. Lisäksi, projekteista nousi esiin muita suosituksia, kuten kehitystiimin yhteisen testaamisvastuun ymmärtäminen, koodikatselmoinnin merkitys ja erillisen testaajan tärkeys, kun projektin maturiteetti on kasvanut riittävästi

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions