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

Towards More Data-Aware Application Integration (extended version)

Although most business application data is stored in relational databases, programming languages and wire formats in integration middleware systems are not table-centric. Due to costly format conversions, data-shipments and faster computation, the trend is to "push-down" the integration operations closer to the storage representation. We address the alternative case of defining declarative, table-centric integration semantics within standard integration systems. For that, we replace the current operator implementations for the well-known Enterprise Integration Patterns by equivalent "in-memory" table processing, and show a practical realization in a conventional integration system for a non-reliable, "data-intensive" messaging example. The results of the runtime analysis show that table-centric processing is promising already in standard, "single-record" message routing and transformations, and can potentially excel the message throughput for "multi-record" table messages.Comment: 18 Pages, extended version of the contribution to British International Conference on Databases (BICOD), 2015, Edinburgh, Scotlan

Correlation Patterns in Service-Orientated Architectures

When a service engages in multiple interactions concurrently, it is generally required to correlate incoming messages with messages previously sent or received. Features to deal with this correlation requirement have been incorporated into standards and tools for service implementation, but the supported sets of features are ad hoc as there is a lack of an overarching framework with respect to which their expressiveness can be evaluated. This paper introduces a set of patterns that provide a basis for evaluating languages and protocols for service implementation in terms of their support for correlation. The proposed correlation patterns are grounded in a formal model that views correlation mechanisms as means of grouping atomic message events into conversations and processes. The paper also provides an evaluation of relevant standards in terms of the patterns, specifically WS-Addressing and BPEL, and discusses how these standards have and could continue to evolve to address a wider set of correlation scenarios

Correlation Patterns in Service-Orientated Architectures

When a service engages in multiple interactions concurrently, it is generally required to correlate incoming messages with messages previously sent or received. Features to deal with this correlation requirement have been incorporated into standards and tools for service implementation, but the supported sets of features are ad hoc as there is a lack of an overarching framework with respect to which their expressiveness can be evaluated. This paper introduces a set of patterns that provide a basis for evaluating languages and protocols for service implementation in terms of their support for correlation. The proposed correlation patterns are grounded in a formal model that views correlation mechanisms as means of grouping atomic message events into conversations and processes. The paper also provides an evaluation of relevant standards in terms of the patterns, specifically WS-Addressing and BPEL, and discusses how these standards have and could continue to evolve to address a wider set of correlation scenarios