Benchmarking Function Hook Latency in Cloud-Native Environments

Researchers and engineers are increasingly adopting cloud-native technologies for application development and performance evaluation. While this has improved the reproducibility of benchmarks in the cloud, the complexity of cloud-native environments makes it difficult to run benchmarks reliably. Cloud-native applications are often instrumented or altered at runtime, by dynamically patching or hooking them, which introduces a significant performance overhead. Our work discusses the benchmarking-related pitfalls of the dominant cloud-native technology, Kubernetes, and how they affect performance measurements of dynamically patched or hooked applications. We present recommendations to mitigate these risks and demonstrate how an improper experimental setup can negatively impact latency measurements.Comment: to be published in the 14th Symposium on Software Performance (SSP 2023), source code available at https://github.com/dynatrace-research/function-hook-latency-benchmarkin

Continuous Secure Software Development and Analysis

Software security becomes increasingly important nowadays. Security should be considered as early as possible in the software development. However, considering different aspects of security is a complex task. In this paper, we propose an extendable framework for continuous secure software development and evolution. The framework provides interconnected analyses on different stages of development. Explicit assumption management helps to verify the security requirements more properly. Thus, the security of the system under development can be estimated more accurately. Finally, the concrete assumptions also help to identify and close security gaps that arise during the software’s lifetime

Live Visualization of Database Behavior for Large Software Landscapes: The RACCOON Approach

Databases are essential components within large software landscapes, since they are employed in almost every information system. Based on the growing complexity of software systems and a steadily increasing amount of data which is collected, processed, and stored in databases, it is difficult to obtain a live overview of these software landscapes. This often leads to an insufficient knowledge of the actual internal structure and behavior of employed databases. Furthermore, databases are often involved in performance issues within information systems. A solution to these problems is employing live visualizations of databases and related communication from applications within the software landscape. These visualizations allow operators to understand their databases in detail and to analyze database queries performed by applications. Based on established visualization concepts like the entity relationship diagrams and the 3D city metaphor, operators can be supported in the task of database comprehension. Established monitoring techniques, like dynamic and static analysis, can be used to capture necessary information from applications and databases. In this paper, we present our live visualization approach of databases and associated communication for large software landscapes. Our visualization offers two different views – a landscape-level and a database-level perspective. The landscape-level perspective provides an overview of monitored applications and related databases. The database-level perspective reveals database schemas within a database, shows contained tables and relationships, and allows for the inspection of executed queries based on the monitoring information collected at runtime

Open-Source Software as Catalyzer for Technology Transfer: Kieker’s Development and Lessons Learned

The monitoring framework Kieker commenced as a joint diploma thesis of the University of Oldenburg and a telecommunication provider in 2006,and grew toward a high-quality open-source project during the last years. Meanwhile, Kieker has been and is employed in various projects.Several research groups constitute the open-source community to advance the Kieker framework. In this paper, we review Kieker's history,development, and impact as catalyzer for technology transfer

Abschlussbericht KMU-innovativ: Verbundprojekt Titan Industrial DevOps Plattform für iterative Prozessintegration und Automatisierung

Unternehmensprozesse zu digitalisieren und dabei eine IT-Infrastruktur aufzubauen, ist komplex. Neue, zum Teil teure Technologien werden eingesetzt, jedoch fehlen erprobte Praktiken. Die daraus entstehende Komplexität lässt sich mit dem klassischen Projektmodell nur ungenügend adressieren. Klassische Planungen basieren auf Annahmen, die sich oft zu spät und als falsch erweisen. Mechanismen, den einmal geplanten Weg zum gesetzten Ziel zu korrigieren, bietet das traditionelle Projektmodell nur eingeschränkt. Ziel des titan-Projekts ist die Integration von Entwicklungswerkzeugen und Betriebs-Technologie in eine Software-Plattform. Kombiniert mit innovativen „Industrial DevOps“- Methoden soll die komplexe Aufgabe einer iterativen Systemintegration im industriellen Umfeld erheblich vereinfacht werden. Im titan-Projekt ist der Prototyp einer Software-Plattform entstanden, die es industriellen Anwendern erlaubt, diese Praktiken auf Problemstellungen der Digitalisierung anzuwenden. Neben Zielen wie Sicherstellung und Überprüfbarkeit von Qualität, Widerstandsfähigkeit und Skalierbarkeit ist die Eliminierung des Vendor-Lock-In ein zentraler Aspekt des Projekts. Insbesondere werden Prozessanpassungen durch die Anwender mittels Flow Based Automation ermöglicht, neue Softwareversionen und Veränderungen können am System routinemäßig in Betrieb genommen werden und domänenspezifische Komponenten können für komplexe Aufgaben genutzt und verwaltet werden. Im Rahmen einer Community wird die titan-Open-Source-Plattform weiterentwickelt. Die während des Projekts entstandenen Innovationen werden so verfeinert und in verschiedenen Bereichen angewendet. Die Erfahrungen aus Projekten fließen in die Software ein und werden innerhalb der Community verbreitet