Guiding Architectural Decision Making on Quality Aspects in Microservice APIs

Zdun, Uwe; Stocker, Mirko; Zimmermann, Olaf; Pautasso, Cesare; Lübke, Daniel

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03596-9_5

Cited by 22 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…[3]). As in our work, we rather aim to provide a rigorously specified model of the established practices, e.g., to support tool building or the definition of metrics and constraints in our future work, we decided to follow the model based qualitative research method described in [26]. It aims to systematically study the established practices in a particular field and is based on the established qualitative research method Grounded Theory (GT) [6] but in contrast to GT it produces inputs for formal software modeling like model element or relation instances, not just informal textual codes.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Decision documentation models have been used by many authors before, and quite a number of them are focused on services, such as those on serviceoriented solutions [29], service-based platform integration [14], REST vs. SOAP [19], microservice API quality [26], big data repositories [7], and service discovery and fault tolerance [9]; however, none of them considers service meshes yet.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Communication in service meshes usually uses encryption based generated keys and certificates; if not used, the service mesh might be exposed to malicious traffic and manipulations, unless a key and certificate management service outside of the service mesh can or must be used. A simple option is using API Keys [26] and local key management. The alternative is to introduce a central certificate authority, residing in the Control Plane, that takes care of storing and distributing security keys and certificates to the Data Plane.…”

Section: Security-related Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another kind of uncertainty reduction is the uncertainty reduction our ADD model provides compared to using the same knowledge, but in a completely unorganized fashion. We want to estimate this kind of uncertainty reduction here, following the approach described in detail in [26]. Here, we estimate the uncertainty reduction only for each individual decision.…”

Section: Estimation Of Uncertainty Reductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To alleviate these problems, we have performed a qualitative, in-depth study of 40 knowledge sources in which practitioners describe established practices. We have based our study on the model-based qualitative research method described in [26], which uses such documented practitioner sources as rather unbiased knowledge sources and systematically codes them using established coding and constant comparison methods [6] combined with precise software modeling, in order to develop a rigorously specified software model of established practices and their relations. This paper aims to study the following research questions: -RQ1 What are the established practices that commonly appear in service mesh based designs and architectures?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Guiding Architectural Decision Making on Service Mesh Based Microservice Architectures

Malki

Zdun

2019

Software Architecture

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Microservices are becoming the de-facto standard way for software development in the cloud and in service-oriented computing. Service meshes have been introduced as a dedicated infrastructure for managing a network of containerized microservices, in order to cope with the complexity, manageability, and interoperability challenges in especially large-scale microservice architectures. Unfortunately so far no dedicated architecture guidance for designing microservices and choosing among technology options in a service mesh exist. As a result, there is a substantial uncertainty in designing and using microservices in a service mesh environment today. To alleviate this problem, we have performed a model-based qualitative in-depth study of existing practices in this field in which we have systematically and in-depth studied 40 reports of established practices from practitioners. In our study we modeled our findings in a rigorously specified reusable architectural decision model, in which we identified 14 architectural design decisions with 47 decision outcomes and 77 decision drivers in total. We estimated the uncertainty in the resulting design space with and without use of our model, and found that a substantial uncertainty reduction can be potentially achieved by applying our model.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Security-related Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Estimation Of Uncertainty Reductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Guiding Architectural Decision Making on Service Mesh Based Microservice Architectures

Malki

Zdun

2019

Software Architecture

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Towards a security‐optimized approach for the microservice‐oriented decomposition

Liu,

Chen,

Qian

et al. 2024

J Software Evolu Process

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Microservice architecture (MSA) is a mainstream architectural style due to its high maintainability and scalability. In practice, an appropriate microservice‐oriented decomposition is the foundation to make a system enjoy the benefits of MSA. In terms of decomposing monolithic systems into microservices, researchers have been exploring many optimization objectives, of which modularity is a predominantly focused quality attribute. Security is also a critical quality attribute, that measures the extent to which a system protects data from malicious access or use by attackers. Considering security in microservices‐oriented decomposition can help avoid the risk of leaking critical data and other unexpected software security issues. However, few researchers consider the security objective during microservice‐oriented decomposition, because the measurement of security and the trade‐off with other objectives are challenging in reality. To bridge this research gap, we propose a security‐optimized approach for microservice‐oriented decomposition (So4MoD). In this approach, we adapt five metrics from previous studies for the measurement of the data security of candidate microservices. A multi‐objective optimization algorithm based on NSGA‐II is designed to search for microservices with optimized security and modularity. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed So4MoD, we perform several experiments on eight open‐source projects and compare the decomposition results to other three state‐of‐the‐art approaches, that is, FoSCI, CO‐GCN, and MSExtractor. The experiment results show that our approach can achieve at least an 11.5% improvement in terms of security metrics. Moreover, the decomposition results of So4MoD outperform other approaches in four modularity metrics, demonstrating that So4MoD can optimize data security while pursuing a well‐modularized MSA.

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Supporting Architectural Decision Making on Data Management in Microservice Architectures

Ntentos

Zdun

Plakidas

et al. 2019

Software Architecture

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Today many service-based systems follow the microservice architecture style. As microservices are used to build distributed systems and promote architecture properties such as independent service development, polyglot technology stacks including polyglot persistence, and loosely coupled dependencies, architecting data management is crucial in most microservice architectures. Many patterns and practices for microservice data management architectures have been proposed, but are today mainly informally discussed in the so-called "grey literature": practitioner blogs, experience reports, and system documentations. As a result, the architectural knowledge is scattered across many knowledge sources that are usually based on personal experiences, inconsistent, and, when studied on their own, incomplete. In this paper we report on a qualitative, in-depth study of 35 practitioner descriptions of best practices and patterns on microservice data management architectures. Following a model-based qualitative research method, we derived a formal architecture decision model containing 325 elements and relations. Comparing the completeness of our model with an existing pattern catalog, we conclude that our architectural decision model substantially reduces the effort needed to sufficiently understand microservice data management decisions, as well as the uncertainty in the design process.

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Guiding Architectural Decision Making on Quality Aspects in Microservice APIs

Cited by 22 publications

References 17 publications

Guiding Architectural Decision Making on Service Mesh Based Microservice Architectures

Guiding Architectural Decision Making on Service Mesh Based Microservice Architectures

Towards a security‐optimized approach for the microservice‐oriented decomposition

Supporting Architectural Decision Making on Data Management in Microservice Architectures

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