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The digital transformation of our life changes the way we work, learn, communicate, and collaborate. Enterprises are presently transforming their strategy, culture, processes, and their information systems to become digital. The digital transformation deeply disrupts existing enterprises and economies. Digitization fosters the development of IT systems with many rather small and distributed structures, like Internet of Things, Microservices and mobile services. Since years a lot of new business opportunities appear using the potential of services computing, Internet of Things, mobile systems, big data with analytics, cloud computing, collaboration networks, and decision support. Biological metaphors of living and adaptable ecosystems provide the logical foundation for self optimizing and resilient run-time environments for intelligent business services and adaptable distributed information systems with service oriented enterprise architectures. This has a strong impact for architecting digital services and products following both a value-oriented and a service perspective. The change from a closed world modeling world to a more flexible open-world composition and evolution of enterprise architectures defines the moving context for adaptable and high distributed systems, which are essential to enable the digital transformation. The present research paper investigates the evolution of Enterprise Architecture considering new defined value-oriented mappings between digital strategies, digital business models and an improved digital enterprise architecture.
Presently, many companies are transforming their strategy and product base, as well as their culture, processes and information systems to become more digital or to approach for a digital leadership. In the last years new business opportunities appeared using the potential of the Internet and related digital technologies, like Internet of Things, services computing, cloud computing, edge and fog computing, social networks, big data with analytics, mobile systems, collaboration networks, and cyber physical systems. Digitization fosters the development of IT environments with many rather small and distributed structures, like the Internet of Things, Microservices, or other micro-granular elements. This has a strong impact for architecting digital services and products. The change from a closed-world modeling perspective to more flexible open-world composition and evolution of micro-granular system architectures defines the moving context for adaptable systems. We are focusing on a continuous bottom-up integration of micro-granular architectures for a huge amount of dynamically growing systems and services, as part of a new digital enterprise architecture for service dominant digital products.
Unternehmen sind derzeit dabei, ihre Strategie, ihre Prozesse und ihre Informationssysteme zu verändern, um ihren Digitalisierungsgrad zu erhöhen. Das Potenzial des Internets und verwandter digitaler Technologien wie Internet der Dinge, Services Computing, Cloud Computing, künstliche Intelligenz, Big Data mit Analysen, mobile Systeme, Kollaborationsnetzwerke und cyber-physikalische Systeme treibt neue Geschäftsmodelle an und ermöglicht sie. Die Digitalisierung führt zu einer tiefgreifenden Umwälzung bestehender Unternehmen, Technologien und Volkswirtschaften und fördert die Architektur digitaler Umgebungen mit vielen eher kleinen und verteilten Strukturen. Dies hat starke Auswirkungen auf neue Wertschöpfungsmöglichkeiten und die Gestaltung digitaler Dienste und Produkte, die durch die Nutzung einer service-dominanten Logik gesteuert werden. Das Hauptergebnis des Buchkapitels erweitert Methoden für integrale digitale Strategien um wertorientierte Modelle für digitale Produkte und Dienstleistungen, die im Rahmen eines multiperspektivischen digitalen Unternehmensarchitektur-Referenzmodells definiert werden.
IT environments that consist of a very large number of rather small structures like microservices, Internet of Things (IoT) components, or mobility systems are emerging to support flexible and agile products and services in the age of digital transformation. Biological metaphors of living and adaptable ecosystems with service-oriented enterprise architectures provide the foundation for self-optimizing, resilient run-time environments and distributed information systems. We are extending Enterprise Architecture (EA) methodologies and models that cover a high degree of heterogeneity and distribution to support the digital transformation and related information systems with micro-granular architectures. Our aim is to support flexibility and agile transformation for both IT and business capabilities within adaptable digital enterprise architectures. The present research paper investigates mechanisms for integrating Microservice Architectures (MSA) by extending original enterprise architecture reference models with elements for more flexible architectural metamodels and EA-mini-descriptions.
The fast moving process of digitization1 demands flexibility in order to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements and newly emerging business opportunities. New features have to be developed and deployed to the production environment a lot faster. To be able to cope with this increased velocity and pressure, a lot of software developing companies have switched to a Microservice Architecture (MSA) approach. Applications built this way consist of several fine-grained and heterogeneous services that are independently scalable and deployable. However, the technological and business architectural impacts of microservices based applications directly affect their integration into the digital enterprise architecture. As a consequence, traditional Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) approaches are not able to handle the extreme distribution, diversity, and volatility of micro-granular systems and services. We are therefore researching mechanisms for dynamically integrating large amounts of microservices into an adaptable digital enterprise architecture.
Context
Microservices as a lightweight and decentralized architectural style with fine-grained services promise several beneficial characteristics for sustainable long-term software evolution. Success stories from early adopters like Netflix, Amazon, or Spotify have demonstrated that it is possible to achieve a high degree of flexibility and evolvability with these systems. However, the described advantageous characteristics offer no concrete guidance and little is known about evolvability assurance processes for microservices in industry as well as challenges in this area. Insights into the current state of practice are a very important prerequisite for relevant research in this field.
Objective
We therefore wanted to explore how practitioners structure the evolvability assurance processes for microservices, what tools, metrics, and patterns they use, and what challenges they perceive for the evolvability of their systems.
Method
We first conducted 17 semi-structured interviews and discussed 14 different microservice-based systems and their assurance processes with software professionals from 10 companies. Afterwards, we performed a systematic grey literature review (GLR) and used the created interview coding system to analyze 295 practitioner online resources.
Results
The combined analysis revealed the importance of finding a sensible balance between decentralization and standardization. Guidelines like architectural principles were seen as valuable to ensure a base consistency for evolvability and specialized test automation was a prevalent theme. Source code quality was the primary target for the usage of tools and metrics for our interview participants, while testing tools and productivity metrics were the focus of our GLR resources. In both studies, practitioners did not mention architectural or service-oriented tools and metrics, even though the most crucial challenges like Service Cutting or Microservices Integration were of an architectural nature.
Conclusions
Practitioners relied on guidelines, standardization, or patterns like Event-Driven Messaging to partially address some reported evolvability challenges. However, specialized techniques, tools, and metrics are needed to support industry with the continuous evaluation of service granularity and dependencies. Future microservices research in the areas of maintenance, evolution, and technical debt should take our findings and the reported industry sentiments into account.
Towards a practical maintainability quality model for service- and microservice-based systems
(2017)
Although current literature mentions a lot of different metrics related to the maintainability of service-based systems (SBSs), there is no comprehensive quality model (QM) with automatic evaluation and practical focus. To fill this gap, we propose a Maintainability Model for Services (MM4S), a layered maintainability QM consisting of service properties (SPs) related with automatically collectable Service Metrics (SMs). This research artifact created within an ongoing Design Science Research (DSR) project is the first version ready for detailed evaluation and critical feedback. The goal of MM4S is to serve as a simple and practical tool for basic maintainability estimation and control in the context of BSs and their specialization
microservice-based systems (μSBSs).
In a time of digital transformation, the ability to quickly and efficiently adapt software systems to changed business requirements becomes more important than ever. Measuring the maintainability of software is therefore crucial for the long-term management of such products. With service-based systems (SBSs) being a very important form of enterprise software, we present a holistic overview of such metrics specifically designed for this type of system, since traditional metrics – e.g. object oriented ones – are not fully applicable in this case. The selected metric candidates from the literature review were mapped to 4 dominant design properties: size, complexity, coupling, and cohesion. Microservice-based systems (μSBSs) emerge as an agile and fine grained variant of SBSs. While the majority of identified metrics are also applicable to this specialization (with some limitations), the large number of services in combination with technological heterogeneity and decentralization of control significantly impacts automatic metric collection in such a system. Our research therefore suggests that specialized tool support is required to guarantee the practical applicability of the presented metrics to μSBSs.
To bring a pattern-based perspective to the SOA vs. microservices discussion, we qualitatively analyzed a total of 118 SOA patterns from 2 popular catalogs for their (partial) applicability to microservices. Patterns had to hold up to 5 derived microservices principles to be applicable. 74 patterns (63%) were categorized as fully applicable, 30 (25%) as partially applicable, and 14 (12%) as not applicable. Most frequently violated microservices characteristics werde Decentralization and Single System. The findings suggest that microservices and SOA share a large set of architectural principles and solutions in the general space of service-based systems while only having a small set of differences in specific areas.
Maintainability assurance techniques are used to control this quality attribute and limit the accumulation of potentially unknown technical debt. Since the industry state of practice and especially the handling of service- and microservice-based systems in this regard are not well covered in scientific literature, we created a survey to gather evidence for a) used processes, tools, and metrics in the industry, b) maintainability-related treatment of systems based on service orientation, and c) influences on developer satisfaction w.r.t. maintainability. 60 software professionals responded to our online questionnaire. The results indicate that using explicit and systematic techniques has benefits for maintainability. The more sophisticated the applied methods the more satisfied participants were with the maintainability of their software while no link to a hindrance in productivity could be established. Other important findings were the absence of architecture-level evolvability control mechanisms as well as a significant neglect of service-oriented particularities for quality assurance. The results suggest that industry has to improve its quality control in these regards to avoid problems with long living service-based software systems.