Challenges and Approaches for the Assessment of Micro-Service Architecture Deployment Alternatives in DevOps : A tutorial presented at ICSA 2020

Abstract

The goal of this tutorial is to provide an overview of challenges and approaches for architecture/dependability assessment in the context of DevOps and microservices. Specifically, we present approaches that employ operational data obtained from production-level application performance management (APM) tools, giving access to operational workload profiles, architectural information, failure models, and security intrusions. We use this data to automatically create and conFigure architecture assessments based on models, load tests, and resilience benchmarks. The focus of this tutorial is on approaches that employ production usage, because these approaches provide more accurate recommendations for microservice architecture dependability assessment than approaches that do not consider production usage.We present an overview of (1) the state-of-the-art approaches for obtaining operational data from production systems using APM tools, (2) the challenges of dependability for DevOps and microservices, (3) selected approaches based on operational data to assess dependability. The architecture assessment focus of this tutorial is on scalability, resilience, survivability, and security. Particularly, we present a demo of the automated approach for the evaluation of a domain-based scalability and security metric assessment that is based on the microservice architecture ability to satisfy the performance requirement under load and/or intrusions. We illustrate the approach by presenting experimental results using a benchmark microservice architecture.