Abstract
Microservices are a commonly used architectural style targeting independent development, deployment, and release of services, as well as supporting polyglot capabilities and rapid release strategies. This depends on the presence of certain software architecture qualities. A number of architecture patterns and best practices that support the required qualities have been proposed in the literature, but usually in isolation of one another. Additionally, in real-world systems, assessing conformance to these patterns and practices and detecting possible violations is a significant challenge. For small-scale systems of a few services, a manual assessment and violation detection by an expert is probably both accurate and sufficient. However, for industrial-scale systems of several hundred or more services, manual assessment and violation detection is laborious and likely leads to inaccurate results. Furthermore, manual assessment is impractical for rapidly evolving and frequently released system architectures. In this work we examine a subset of microservice-relevant patterns, and propose a method for the semi-automatic detection and resolution of conformance violations. Our aim is to assist the software architect by providing a set of possible fix options and generating models of “fixed” architectures.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Pahl, C., Jamshidi, P.: Microservices: a systematic mapping study. In: 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, pp. 137–146 (2016)
Pautasso, C., Wilde, E.: Why is the web loosely coupled?: a multi-faceted metric for service design. In: 18th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 911–920. ACM (2009)
Richardson, C.: A pattern language for microservices (2017). http://microservices.io/patterns/index.html
Zimmermann, O., Gschwind, T., Küster, J., Leymann, F., Schuster, N.: Reusable architectural decision models for enterprise application development. In: Overhage, S., Szyperski, C.A., Reussner, R., Stafford, J.A. (eds.) QoSA 2007. LNCS, vol. 4880, pp. 15–32. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77619-2_2
Zimmermann, O.: Microservices tenets. Comput. Sci. - Res. Dev. 32(3), 301–310 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-016-0337-0
Pautasso, C., Zimmermann, O., Amundsen, M., Lewis, J., Josuttis, N.: Microservices in practice, part 1: reality check and service design. IEEE Softw. 34(1), 91–98 (2017)
Zimmermann, O., Stocker, M., Zdun, U., Luebke, D., Pautasso, C.: Microservice API patterns (2019). https://microservice-api-patterns.org
Skowronski, J.: Best practices for event-driven microservice architecture (2019). https://hackernoon.com/best-practices-for-event-driven-microservice-architecture-e034p21lk
Ntentos, E., Zdun, U., Plakidas, K., Meixner, S., Geiger, S.: Metrics for assessing architecture conformance to microservice architecture patterns and practices. In: Kafeza, E., Benatallah, B., Martinelli, F., Hacid, H., Bouguettaya, A., Motahari, H. (eds.) ICSOC 2020. LNCS, vol. 12571, pp. 580–596. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65310-1_42
Bures, T., Duchien, L., Inverardi, P. (eds.): ECSA 2019. LNCS, vol. 11681. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29983-5
Hohpe, G., Woolf, B.: Enterprise Integration Patterns. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2003)
Lewis, J., Fowler, M.: Microservices: a definition of this new architectural term, March 2004. http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html
Taibi, D., Lenarduzzi, V.: On the definition of microservice bad smells. IEEE Softw. 35(3), 56–62 (2018)
Neri, D., Soldani, J., Zimmermann, O., Brogi, A.: Design principles, architectural smells and refactorings for microservices: a multivocal review. SICS Software-Intensive Cyber-Physical Systems 35(1), 3–15 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-019-00407-8
Le, D.M., Carrillo, C., Capilla, R., Medvidovic, N.: Relating architectural decay and sustainability of software systems. In: 2016 13th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA), pp. 178–181 (2016)
Garcia, J., Popescu, D., Edwards, G., Medvidovic, N.: Identifying architectural bad smells. In: 2009 13th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, pp. 255–258 (2009)
Garcia, J., Popescu, D., Edwards, G., Medvidovic, N.: Toward a catalogue of architectural bad smells. In: Mirandola, R., Gorton, I., Hofmeister, C. (eds.) QoSA 2009. LNCS, vol. 5581, pp. 146–162. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02351-4_10
Azadi, U., Fontana, F., Taibi, D.: Architectural smells detected by tools: a catalogue proposal. In: 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt), pp. 88–97 (2019)
Brogi, A., Neri, D., Soldani, J., et al.: Freshening the air in microservices: resolving architectural smells via refactoring. In: Yangui, S. (ed.) ICSOC 2019. LNCS, vol. 12019, pp. 17–29. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45989-5_2
Le, D.M., Link, D., Shahbazian, A., Medvidovic, N.: An empirical study of architectural decay in open-source software. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA), pp. 176–17609 (2018)
Marinescu, R.: Detection strategies: metrics-based rules for detecting design flaws. In: 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2004. Proceedings, pp. 350–359 (2004)
Ntentos, E., Zdun, U., Plakidas, K., Geiger, S.: Semi-automatic feedback for improving architecture conformance to microservice patterns and practices. In: 18th IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture(ICSA 2021), March 2021. http://eprints.cs.univie.ac.at/6763/
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by: FFG (Austrian Research Promotion Agency) project DECO, no. 864707; FWF (Austrian Science Fund) project API-ACE: I 4268; FWF (Austrian Science Fund) project IAC\(^2\): I 4731-N. Our work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952647 (AssureMOSS project).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ntentos, E., Zdun, U., Plakidas, K., Geiger, S. (2021). Evaluating and Improving Microservice Architecture Conformance to Architectural Design Decisions. In: Hacid, H., Kao, O., Mecella, M., Moha, N., Paik, Hy. (eds) Service-Oriented Computing. ICSOC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91431-8_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91431-8_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-91430-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91431-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)