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

An empirical study of architecting for continuous delivery and deployment

Recently, many software organizations have been adopting Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment (CD) practices to develop and deliver quality software more frequently and reliably. Whilst an increasing amount of the literature covers different aspects of CD, little is known about the role of software architecture in CD and how an application should be (re-) architected to enable and support CD. We have conducted a mixed-methods empirical study that collected data through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 21 industrial practitioners from 19 organizations, and a survey of 91 professional software practitioners. Based on a systematic and rigorous analysis of the gathered qualitative and quantitative data, we present a conceptual framework to support the process of (re-) architecting for CD. We provide evidence-based insights about practicing CD within monolithic systems and characterize the principle of "small and independent deployment units" as an alternative to the monoliths. Our framework supplements the architecting process in a CD context through introducing the quality attributes (e.g., resilience) that require more attention and demonstrating the strategies (e.g., prioritizing operations concerns) to design operations-friendly architectures. We discuss the key insights (e.g., monoliths and CD are not intrinsically oxymoronic) gained from our study and draw implications for research and practice.Comment: To appear in Empirical Software Engineerin

Software Sustainability in the Age of Everything as a Service

The need for acknowledging and managing sustainability as an essential quality of software systems has been steadily increasing over the past few years, in part as a reaction to the implications of ``software eating the world\u27\u27. Especially the widespread adoption of the Everything as a Service (*aaS) model of delivering software and (virtualized) hardware through cloud computing has put two sustainability dimensions upfront and center. On the one hand, services must be sustainable on a technical level by ensuring continuity of operations for both providers and consumers despite, or even better, while taking into account their evolution. On the other hand, the prosuming of services must also be financially sustainable for the involved stakeholders

ICT-based reforms in local government decision-making in the gram panchayats of Kerala

The beneficial impact of computerisation can be felt in all elements that contribute to decision-making in panchayats in the state of Kerala. However, even though computerisation is bringing about immense improvements compared to traditional administrative practices, but scope still remains for further improvement. Instead of the 'as it is' computerisation that is mostly carried out a process based approach is needed

Towards Supporting the Extended DevOps Approach through Multi-cloud Architectural Patterns for Design and Pre-deployment - A Tool Supported Approach

Recently the world of Cloud Computing is witnessing two major trends: Multi-cloud applications pushed by the increasing diversity of Cloud services leading to hybrid infrastructures and the DevOps paradigm, promising increased trust, faster software releases, and the ability to solve critical issues quickly (Steinborn, 2018). This paper presents a solution for merging and adapting both trends so that the benefits for software developers and operators are multiplied. The authors describe a tool-supported approach to extend the DevOps philosophy with the objective of supporting the design and pre-deployment of multi-cloud software applications. The paper begins with the presentation of the theoretical concepts, the proceeds with the description of the developed tools and the discussion of the validation performed with a sandbox application.The project leading to this paper has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 731533

Microservices Architecture Enables DevOps: an Experience Report on Migration to a Cloud-Native Architecture

This article reports on experiences and lessons learned during incremental migration and architectural refactoring of a commercial mobile back end as a service to microservices architecture. It explains how the researchers adopted DevOps and how this facilitated a smooth migration