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

Feature-Model-Guided Online Learning for Self-Adaptive Systems

A self-adaptive system can modify its own structure and behavior at runtime based on its perception of the environment, of itself and of its requirements. To develop a self-adaptive system, software developers codify knowledge about the system and its environment, as well as how adaptation actions impact on the system. However, the codified knowledge may be insufficient due to design time uncertainty, and thus a self-adaptive system may execute adaptation actions that do not have the desired effect. Online learning is an emerging approach to address design time uncertainty by employing machine learning at runtime. Online learning accumulates knowledge at runtime by, for instance, exploring not-yet executed adaptation actions. We address two specific problems with respect to online learning for self-adaptive systems. First, the number of possible adaptation actions can be very large. Existing online learning techniques randomly explore the possible adaptation actions, but this can lead to slow convergence of the learning process. Second, the possible adaptation actions can change as a result of system evolution. Existing online learning techniques are unaware of these changes and thus do not explore new adaptation actions, but explore adaptation actions that are no longer valid. We propose using feature models to give structure to the set of adaptation actions and thereby guide the exploration process during online learning. Experimental results involving four real-world systems suggest that considering the hierarchical structure of feature models may speed up convergence by 7.2% on average. Considering the differences between feature models before and after an evolution step may speed up convergence by 64.6% on average. [...

Cloud based collaborative software development: A review, gap analysis and future directions

Organizations who have transitioned their development environments to the Cloud have started realizing benefits such as: cost reduction in hardware; relatively accelerated development process via reduction of time and effort to set up development and testing environments; unified management; service and functionality expansion; on-demand provisioning and access to resources and development environments. These benefits represent only a fraction of the full potential that could be achieved via leveraging Cloud Computing for the collaborative software development process. Related efforts in this area have been mainly in the areas of: asynchronous collaboration; collaboration in isolated aspects of the Software Development process, such as coding activities; use of open-source tools for contributing, improving, and managing code, etcetera. Although these efforts represent valid contributions and important enablers, they are still missing important aspects which enable a more holistic process, with solid theoretical foundation. This paper reviews this research area, in order to better assess factors and gaps creating the need to enhance the collaborative software development process in the Cloud, to better meet the pressure to collaboratively create better cloud-agnostic applications. © 2017 IEEE

Characterizing and providing interoperability to function as a service platforms

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática e de ComputadoresA computação sem servidor abstrai o controlo da infraestrutura dos programadores e executa código a pedido com escalonamento automático onde apenas se é cobrado pela quantidade de recursos consumidos. Um dos serviços mais populares da computação sem servidor é a Função como Serviço (Function-as-a-Service ou FaaS), onde os programadores são muitas vezes confrontados com requisitos específicos dos prestadores de serviços de nuvem. Requisitos de assinatura das funções, e o uso de bibliotecas exclusivas ao prestador de serviços, foram identificados como sendo as principais causas de problemas de portabilidade das aplicações FaaS. O controlo reduzido da infraestrutura e a elevada dependência para com o prestador de serviços dá origem a diversos problemas de aprisionamento tecnológico. Neste trabalho, introduzimos o QuickFaaS, uma ferramenta para desktop de interoperabilidade multi-cloud com foco principal no desenvolvimento de funções agnósticas à nuvem e na criação das mesmas na respetiva plataforma. O QuickFaaS permite melhorar substancialmente a produtividade, flexibilidade e agilidade no desenvolvimento de soluções sem servidor para múltiplos prestadores de serviços, sem o requisito de instalar software adicional. A abordagem agnóstica à nuvem irá permitir que os programadores reutilizem as suas funções em diferentes prestadores de serviços sem terem a necessidade de reescrever código. A solução visa a minimizar o aprisionamento tecnológico nas plataformas FaaS através do aumento da portabilidade das funções sem servidor, incentivando assim programadores e organizações a apostarem em diferentes prestadores de serviços em troca de um benefício funcional.Serverless computing hides infrastructure management from developers and runs code on-demand automatically scaled and billed during code’s execution time. One of the most popular serverless backend services is called Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), in which developers are many times confronted with cloud-specific requirements. Function signature requirements, and the usage of custom libraries that are unique to cloud providers, were identified as the two main reasons for portability issues in FaaS applications. Such reduced control over the infrastructure and tight-coupling with cloud services amplifies various vendor lock-in problems. In this work, we introduce QuickFaaS, a multi-cloud interoperability desktop tool targeting cloud-agnostic functions development and FaaS deployments. QuickFaaS substantially improves developers’ productivity, flexibility and agility when creating serverless solutions to multiple cloud providers, without requiring the installation of extra software. The proposed cloud-agnostic approach enables developers to reuse their serverless functions in different cloud providers with no need to rewrite code. The solution aims to minimize vendor lock-in in FaaS platforms by increasing the portability of serverless functions, which will, therefore, encourage developers and organizations to target different providers in exchange for a functional benefit.N/

Development of an ERP with CI/CD application, Authentication and System Auditing

Developing and maintaining software like ERPs can be challenging because of the complexity and the amount of data that these systems require maintaining. Many of the software programs can grow with weak structure, which lead to great effort to maintain, and with more probability to error. This project proposes that a development cycle that incorporates DevOps can have major bene ts, by not only removing some hassle the programmers and systems admins have with testing and deploying the system, but can also give a early feedback if the changes made into the application brings problems to the systems. The design of a CI/CD pipeline and audit logs, and the implementation in an ERP development helped get more feedback and cause of root problems, which lead to more confidence in the developers to make changes, and to escalate more quickly since the deployment is automatized.Desenvolver "software" como os ERPs podem ser difícil de manter devido à complexidade e a quantidade de dados envolvida nestes sistemas. Isto leva a que muitos destes "softwares" cresçam com uma estrutura de código fraca, o que leva a um esforço adicional para manter, e com maior probabilidade para erros. Este projeto propõe que a incorporação do conceito de DevOps no ciclo de desenvolvimento traz muitas vantagens, não só a remover algum trabalho dos programadores e dos administradores de sistemas ao ser mais fácil testar o sistema e fazer deploy do mesmo, mas também fornece uma forma de feedback mais rápida para eventuais erros. O "design" de uma pipeline CI/CD e logs para auditoria do sistema, e a respetiva implementação destes conceitos no desenvolvimento consegue dar mais feedback a problemas, o que leva a uma maior confiança dos programadores para fazer alterações, e conseguir escalar a solução mais rapidamente visto que a implantação é automatizada