Abstract
The so-called API economy has popularised the consumption of APIs and their payment through pricing plans. This trend is very much in line with and particularly beneficial for systems with a microservices architecture that makes use of external APIs. In these cases, more and more often, the design of the system is based on the premise that its functionality is offered to its users within certain operating conditions, which implies that its architecture is aware of both the plans of external APIs and its capacity limits. We have coined these architectures as limitation-aware microservices architectures (LAMA). Furthermore, in case of a Software as a Service (SaaS) model implemented with a LAMA, the operating conditions would be explicitly grounded in the specific plans agreed with the SaaS customers. In such a context, to design a set of potential pricing plans for the LAMA and predict the expected operating conditions, it is necessary to determine the capacity limits that the architecture will offer and the cost of using external API. This is a tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone activity, so its automation would be of great value to software architects.
In this paper, we coin the term LAMA, describe the problem of automated capacity analysis of LAMAs, present a first approach to solving it by interpreting it as an optimisation problem implementable as a constraint satisfaction and optimisation problem and introduce three basic analysis operations from which any number of other operations can be modelled. Finally, a tooling support is also introduced.
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Notes
- 1.
Available at https://smart-lama-api-beta.herokuapp.com/api/v2.
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Acknowledgments
Grants RTI2018-101204-B-C21, RTI2018-101204-B-C22, PID2021-126227NB-C21, PID2021-126227NB-C22 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and “ERDF a way of making Europe”; grants P18-FR-2895, US-1264651 and US-1381595 funded by Junta de Andalucıa /ERDF, UE; and grant FPU19/00666 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ESF Investing in your future”.
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Fresno–Aranda, R., Fernández, P., Durán, A., Ruiz–Cortés, A. (2023). Semi-automated Capacity Analysis of Limitation-Aware Microservices Architectures. In: Bañares, J.Á., Altmann, J., Agmon Ben-Yehuda, O., Djemame, K., Stankovski, V., Tuffin, B. (eds) Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services. GECON 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13430. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29315-3_7
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