Systematic Scalability Analysis for Microservices Granularity Adaptation Design Decisions

Hassan, Sara and Bahsoon, Rami and Buyya, Rajkumar (2022) Systematic Scalability Analysis for Microservices Granularity Adaptation Design Decisions. Software: Practice and Experience. ISSN 0038-0644

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Abstract

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomous, scalable, and more reliable computing. A critical problem related to microservices is reasoning about the suitable granularity level of a microservice (i.e. when and how to merge or decompose microservices). Although scalability is pronounced as one of the major factors for adoption of microservices, there is a general gap of approaches that systematically analyse the dimensions and metrics which are important for scalability-aware granularity adaptation decisions. To the best of our knowledge, the state-of-art in reasoning about microservice granularity adaptation is neither: 1) driven by microservice-specific scalability dimensions and metrics nor, 2) follow systematic scalability analysis to make scalability-aware adaptation decisions. In this paper, we address the aforementioned problems using a two-fold contribution. Firstly, we contribute to a working catalogue of microservice-specific scalability dimensions and metrics. Secondly, we describe a novel application of scalability goal-obstacle analysis for the context of reasoning about microservice granularity adaptation. We analyse both contributions by comparing their usage on a hypothetical microservice architecture against ad-hoc scalability assessment for the same architecture. This analysis shows how both contributions can aid making scalability-aware granularity adaptation decisions.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.1002/spe.3069
Dates:	Date Event 25 December 2021 Accepted 31 January 2022 Published Online
Uncontrolled Keywords:	microservices, scalability, systematic analysis, guidance, goal-oriented analysis
Subjects:	CAH11 - computing > CAH11-01 - computing > CAH11-01-01 - computer science CAH11 - computing > CAH11-01 - computing > CAH11-01-04 - software engineering
Divisions:	Architecture, Built Environment, Computing and Engineering > Computer Science
Depositing User:	Sara Hassan
Date Deposited:	04 Jan 2022 14:57
Last Modified:	16 Feb 2022 13:53
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/12580

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