Implementation of DevOps pipeline for Serverless Applications

Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model where server-side logic runs in the stateless compute containers that are event-triggered and usually fully managed by vendor hosts such as AWS Lambda. This approach is also called Function as a Service (FaaS). Applications that rely on this approach are called Serverless applications. Serverless usage promises infrastructure cost reduction and automatic scalability. One more important benefit of serverless is making the operations part of DevOps process simpler. It reduces the time on the management and maintenance of the servers and sometimes makes them even completely unnecessary. Despite this fact, applications using serverless computing model require a new look at DevOps automation practices since it is a new approach to software architecture design and software development workflow. The goal of this thesis is to implement DevOps pipeline for a Serverless application within a single case organization and evaluate the results of implementation. This is done through design science research, where result artifact is a release pipeline designed and implemented according to the requirements for a new project in the case organization. The result of the study is automated DevOps pipeline with implemented Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD) and Monitoring practices required for the case project. The research shows that architecture of Serverless applications affects many DevOps automation practices such as test execution, deployment and monitoring of the application. It also affects the decisions about source code repositories structure, mocking libraries and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools

Software architecture visualisation

Tracing the history of software engineering reveals a series of abstractions. In early days, software engineers would construct software using machine code. As time progressed, software engineers and computer scientists developed higher levels of abstraction in order to provide tools to assist in building larger software systems. This has resulted in high-level languages, modelling languages, design patterns, and software architecture. Software architecture has been recognised as an important tool for designing and building software. Some research takes the view that the success or failure of a software development project depends heavily on the quality of the software architecture. For any software system, there are a number of individuals who have some interest in the architecture. These stakeholders have differing requirements of the software architecture depending on the role that they take. Stakeholders include the architects, designers, developers and also the sales, services and support teams and even the customer for the software. Communication and understanding of the architecture is essential in ensuring that each stakeholder can play their role during the design, development and deployment of that software system. Software visualisation has traditionally been focused on aiding the understanding of software systems by those who perform development and maintenance tasks on that software. In supporting developers and maintainers, software visualisation has been largely concerned with representing static and dynamic aspects of software at the code level. Typically, a software visualisation will represent control flow, classes, objects, import relations and other such low level abstractions of the software. This research identifies the fundamental issues concerning software architecture visualisation. It does this by identifying the practical use of software architecture in the real world, and considers the application of software visualisation techniques to the visualisation of software architecture. The aim of this research is to explore the ways in which software architecture visualisation can assist in the tasks undertaken by the differing stakeholders in a software system and its architecture. A prototype tool, named ArchVis, has been developed to enable the exploration of some of the fundamental issues in software architecture visualisation. ArchVis is a new approach to software architecture visualisation that is capable of utilising multiple sources and representations of architecture in order to generate multiple views of software architecture. The mechanism by which views are generated means that they can be more relevant to a wider collection of stakeholders in that architecture. During evaluation ArchVis demonstrates the capability of utilising a number of data sources in order to produce architecture visualisations. Arch Vis' view model is capable of generating the necessary views for architecture stakeholders and those stakeholders can navigate through the views and data in order to obtain relevant information. The results of evaluating ArchVis using a framework and scenarios demonstrate that the majority of the objectives of this research have been achieved

Information system design based on microservice architecture

In recent years, microservice architecture has become the mainstream approach to modern information system design, and the central idea of this architecture is to improve the scalability, reliability and maintainability of the system by splitting it into small, independent service units. This paper introduces the main ideas and practices of information system design based on microservice architecture, including service splitting, service communication, service governance and service deployment. In addition, this paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the current microservice architecture, and illustrates how to design and implement information systems based on microservice architecture in practical applications with real cases

A concern-oriented approach to software architecture

A major cause of many complications in the field of software architectures is the lack of appropriate abstractions for separating, combining and encapsulating concerns of various kinds in architectural descriptions. Architectures of most complex software-intensive systems involve concerns that inherently crosscut the natural boundaries of the elements composing the architecture descriptions. Crosscutting concerns intersect the common modularity of systems as prescribed by their architecture descriptions, by traversing both the components and connectors, i.e., the relationships among the components. Crosscutting concerns are critical aspects of many architectural problems. However, architectural descriptions written in special-purpose languages (ADLs) like Wright, Darwin, Rapide and Acme should support descriptions of multiple structures, which include diagrams, models and views, that intentionally address different kinds of concerns. ADLs should show how various concerns affect each other in architectural designs; they should also allow one to identify, analyze and elaborate architectural concerns that cut across several software components, such as transactions, security, load balancing, synchronization, reuse, customization, scalability, etc.; they should, but they do not. This dissertation presents a new approach to software architecture that is suitable for supporting concern-oriented development and documentation of architectures for software-intensive systems. This approach allows for creating and documenting a multidimensional software structure that is referred to as concern-oriented software architecture; it provides new mechanisms for encapsulating individual concerns into independent architectural constructs. The ultimate goal of this new approach is to provide support for achieving design by concerns all through the development and description of software architectures. Moving towards this goal, we present a particular concern-oriented architectural framework called Perspectival Concern-Spaces (PCS). The PCS Framework offers a flexible and extensible means a) for supporting advanced separation of concerns in architectural design, and in the construction and evolution of software-intensive systems; and b) for filling the gap between architectural descriptions and modern software development artifacts. To show the feasibility of the proposed approach, we provide new modeling techniques that are used to describe and apply an aspect-oriented architectural pattern, called the On-demand Remodularization pattern. We give several examples of how the PCS Framework can be used to integrate concern-oriented architectural documentations with mainstream software development artifacts

Generic Concern-Oriented Model Transformations Meet AOP

Abstract. Separation of concerns allows developers to manage large distributed systems by tackling one problem at a time. Model transformations refine models along one concern-dimension. Aspects encapsulate implementation details that cut across the boundaries of several components. In this position paper, after a short introduction to these emerging technologies, we explain how generic concern-oriented model transformations can meet aspect-oriented programming in order to complete the life-cycle of software application development in a pure MDA-compliant way based on separation of concerns. At the end, we present some requirements that tool vendors should provide if they decide to support such an approach