Position paper: Toward an holistic approach of Systems of Systems

Abstract

Large scale distributed systems have become ubiquitous, from on-line social networks to the Internet-of-things. To meet rising expectations (scalability, robustness, flexibility,...) these systems increasingly espouse complex distributed architectures, that are hard to design, deploy and maintain. To grasp this complexity, developers should be allowed to assemble large distributed systems from smaller parts using a seamless, high-level programming paradigm. We present such an assembly-based programming framework, enabling developers to easily define and realize complex distributed topologies as a construction of simpler blocks (e.g. rings, grids). It does so by harnessing the power of self-organizing overlays, that is made accessible to developers through a high-level Domain Specific Language and self-stabilizing runtime. Our evaluation further shows that our approach is generic, expressive, low-overhead and robust.