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

Cloud migration strategy factors and migration processes

Organisaatiot ottavat pilvitekniikoita ja -palveluita käyttöönsä yhä laajemmin. Merkittävä osa pilvipalveluiden kasvusta johtuu nykyisten sovellusten siirtämisestä pilvipalveluun. Olemassa olevien vanhojen sovellusten siirtäminen pilvipalvelualustaan ei ole triviaali tehtävä. Migraatiomenetelmät tehostavat sovellusten siirtoa pilvialustoille ja vähentävät siirrosta aiheutuvia riskejä käyttäen vakioituja prosessimalleja. Keskeinen osa pilvimigraatioprosessia on valita sopivin strategia pilvimigraatiolle useiden vaihtoehtoisten tilanteesta riippuvien vaihtoehtojen joukosta. Migraatiostrategia määrittelee keskeiset migraatioprosessin vaiheet sekä käytettävän pilviarkkitehtuurin sekä palvelumallit. Nykyiset pilven migraatiomenetelmät eivät erityisesti huomioi tai määrittele migraatiostrategian valintaa määrääviä tekijöitä. Migraatiostrategian valinta on kriittinen osa pilvimigraation suunnittelua, johon tyypillisesti osallistuu useita eri organisaatioita ja asiantuntijoita. Tässä opinnäytetyössä esitetään ryhmittely sekä tekijät, jotka ohjaavat pilvimigraatiostrategian valintaa. Tekijät on johdettu nykyisistä pilvimigraatiomenetelmistä ja -prosesseista. Tekijät on validoitu deduktiivisella temaattisella analyysillä käyttäen kvalitatiivisia tapaustutkimuksia ja niistä saatuja haastattelutietoja. Pilvimigraatiostrategioihin vaikuttavien tekijöiden tunnistamisella ja käsittelyllä voidaan parantaa pilvimigraatioiden onnistumista ja tehostaa pilvimigraatioiden suunnittelua.Organizations are adopting cloud technologies at an increasing rate. Significant share of growth of cloud deployments is coming from application migrations to cloud computing. Migrating existing legacy applications to cloud computing platform is not a trivial task. A migration methodology will help migrating applications to cloud more effectively and with lower risk than doing it by trial and error. A part of the cloud migration process is the selection and execution of a migration strategy amongst the possible, situational and commonly used options. The migration strategy defines many of the migration process activities since they depend on cloud architecture and service and deployment models, which are implicitly set by the migration strategy. Many of the existing cloud migration methods don’t specify the factors that lead to migration strategy selection. The migration strategy selection is a critical part of migration planning involving multiple organisations and several individuals. This thesis presents categories of migration strategy factors derived from a cloud migration methodology and process framework review and validates the factors by doing a deductive thematic analysis against qualitative case study interview data. By having a clarity and a way to address the migration strategy factors, will increase the migration success rate and reduce planning time

From Monolithic Systems to Microservices: An Assessment Framework

Context. Re-architecting monolithic systems with Microservices-based architecture is a common trend. Various companies are migrating to Microservices for different reasons. However, making such an important decision like re-architecting an entire system must be based on real facts and not only on gut feelings. Objective. The goal of this work is to propose an evidence-based decision support framework for companies that need to migrate to Microservices, based on the analysis of a set of characteristics and metrics they should collect before re-architecting their monolithic system. Method. We designed this study with a mixed-methods approach combining a Systematic Mapping Study with a survey done in the form of interviews with professionals to derive the assessment framework based on Grounded Theory. Results. We identified a set consisting of information and metrics that companies can use to decide whether to migrate to Microservices or not. The proposed assessment framework, based on the aforementioned metrics, could be useful for companies if they need to migrate to Microservices and do not want to run the risk of failing to consider some important information

Optimized Strategy in Cloud-Native Environment for Inter-Service Communication in Microservices

Cloud computing has become a prominent technology in the software development industry. The term “cloud-native” is derived from cloud computing technologies and refers to the development and deployment of applications in a cloud environment. In the software industry, most enterprise-grade software buildings use the microservice architecture and cloud natively, ultimately leading to an expansive development in the software development framework. Microservices are deployed in a distributed environment and function as independent services. However, they need to communicate with each other in order to fulfill the functional requirement. Additional latency will be introduced when communicating with other services. Hence, it will impact the overall application response time and throughput. This research proposes a solution for the aforementioned problem in the cloud-native environment. A Request-response-based TCP communication solution has been developed and tested in the cloud-native, containerized environment. Experimental results showed that the turnaround time of the proposed solution is shorter than that of traditional HTTP communication methods. Furthermore, the results summarize that both vertical and horizontal scaling are improving the overall performance of the systems performance in terms of response time. Conclusively, the proposed solution improved the microservice performance and preserved the existing cloud-native qualities, such as scalability, maintainability, and portability