Overcoming Security Challenges in Microservice Architectures

The Microservice Architecture Style (MSA) has emerged as a significant computing paradigm in software engineering, with companies increasingly restructuring their monolithic systems to enhance digital performance and competitiveness. However, the migration process, particularly the microservice identification phase, presents complex challenges that require careful consideration. This study aimed to provide developers and researchers with a practical roadmap for microservice identification during legacy system migration while highlighting crucial migration steps and research requirements. Through a systematic mapping study following Kitchenham and Petersen’s guidelines, we analyzed various microservice identification approaches and developed a middleweight ontology that can be queried for key inputs, data modeling, identification algorithms, and performance evaluation metrics. Our research makes several significant contributions: a comprehensive analysis of existing identification methodologies, a multi-dimensional framework for categorizing and evaluating approaches, an examination of current research trajectories and literature gaps, an ontological framework specifically designed for microservice identification, and an outline of pressing challenges and future research directions. The study concluded that microservice identification remains a significant barrier in system migration efforts, highlighting the need for more research focused on developing effective identification techniques that consider various aspects, including roles and dependencies within a microservice architecture. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights for professionals and researchers working on microservice migration projects.

Due to REST-based protocols, microservice architectures are inherently horizontally scalable. That might be why the microservice architectural style is getting more and more attention for cloud-native application engineering. Corresponding microservice architectures often rely on a complex technology stack which includes containers, elastic platforms and software defined networks. Astonishingly, there are almost no specialized tools to figure out performance impacts (coming along with this microservice architectural style) in the upfront of a microservice design. Therefore, we propose a benchmarking solution intentionally designed for this upfront design phase. Furthermore, we evaluate our benchmark and present some performance data to reflect some often heard cloud-native application performance rules (or myths).

<p>In the current technological scenario of the industry and businesses, there has been increasing need of software within systems and also an increasing demand being put onto software-intensive systems. This in effect will lead to a significant evolution of software engineering processes over the next twenty years. This is due to the fact of emerging technological advancements like Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things in the IT field, among other new developments. This paper addresses and tries to analyses the key research challenges being faced by the software engineering field and articulates information that is derived from the key research specializations within software engineering. The paper analyses the past and current trends in software engineering. The future of software engineering is also looked with respect to Industry 4.0 which including emerging technological platforms like Internet of Things. The societal impact aspect of future trends in software engineering is also addressed in this paper.</p>

In recent years, the MicroServices architectural style has significantly grown in popularity due to its application to large-scale software systems with positive results. In the domain of Software Architecture, textual Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) can be used to describe the architecture of a software intensive system at an abstract level. μσADL is such an ADL, co-created by the author, designed in order to provide to software architects and various stakeholders a practical way for describing software systems that follow the microservices architectural style. In this paper, an example is presented, where a system based upon this style is described using μσADL. The constructs provided by the language concerning the description and dynamic reconfiguration of a microservice architecture are presented.

The microservices architectural style is gaining more and more momentum for the development of applications as suites of small, autonomous, and conversational services, which are then easy to understand, deploy and scale. However, the proliferation of approaches leveraging microservices calls for a systematic way of analyzing and assessing them as a completely new ecosystem: the first cloud-native architectural style. This paper defines a preliminary analysis framework in the form of a taxonomy of concepts, encompassing the whole microservices lifecycle, as well as organizational aspects. This framework is necessary to enable effective exploration, understanding, assessing, comparing, and selecting microservice-based models, languages, techniques, platforms, and tools. Then, we analyze state of the art approaches related to microservices using this taxonomy to provide a holistic perspective of available solutions.

Plug & Produce is an important part of the 4th industrial revolution (I4.0) that focuses on product development and production scenarios, demanding rapid adaptation to customer needs, with minimum effort, and no business interruption. Achieving this requires the use of flexible and agile automation systems. Microservices Architecture can be an opportunity to bring such flexibility and agility to industrial automation systems. Since Microservices Architecture is a new paradigm in service-oriented systems, an in-depth analysis from the industrial automation perspective is necessary in order to figure out why and how this new architecture could be helpful to build flexible automation systems. In this paper we first clearly describe and characterize the Microservices Architecture. We next discuss an existing paradox in microservice granularity, and suggest an approach to solve the mentioned paradox. Then we compare this new approach to the Service Oriented Architecture, highlight the key (dis)advantages of utilizing Microservice Architecture in building flexible automation systems that fits in 4th industrial revolution needs, and describe the challenges to its future adoption.

Microservice architecture is becoming the de facto industry standard for building new enterprise applications. In order to remain competitive, companies have started to modernize their legacy monolithic systems by decomposing them into microservices. However, extracting microservices from legacy monolithic software is extremely complex task, which consists of many different issues such as microservices identification, code decomposition, communication establishment between decomposed microservices, independent deployment, data storage adaptation and etc. Although the topic of monolithic software migration into microservice architecture has already been explored by scientists and software engineers, it is a complex and relatively new research topic. The primary focus of most investigations is the microservice identification within monolith application as well as source code decomposition into microservices. A novel approach to migrate legacy monolithic applications into microservices is proposed in this paper. It includes not only code decomposition stage, but also covers communication establishment between microservices and data management.

This doctoral research proposal is designed to address the challenges on employing microservices architecture (MSA) in DevOps. These two practices are relatively recent trends on the crowded street of software engineering paradigms. We believe that the coexistence of these practices may bring new challenges for architects about making and implementing decisions of microservices in DevOps. We plan to gain a deep understanding of the challenges/solutions, architecture description, migration, refactoring, and evolution in MSA with DevOps. Our expected outcome would be: (i) a systematic mapping study on MSA in DevOps, (ii) an evidence based framework for synthesizing MSA challenges/solutions in DevOps, (iii) recommendations for documenting MSA in DevOps based on industrial practices, (iv) a migration process from monolithic applications/architecture to MSA in DevOps, and (v) empirical reports on MSA refactoring and evolution in DevOps.

A recent trend in software engineering is the shift from a focus on laboratory-oriented software engineering to a more industry-oriented view of software engineering processes. This complements preceding ideas about software engineering in terms of organization and process-orientation. From the domain coverage point of view, many of the existing software engineering approaches have mainly concentrated on the technical aspects of software development. Important areas of software engineering, such as the technical and organizational infrastructures, have been left untouched. As software systems increase in scales, issues of complexity and professional practices become involved. Software development as an academic or laboratory activity, has to engage with software development as a key industrialized process. This expanded domain of software engineering exposes the limitations of existing methodologies that often address only individual subdomains. There is, therefore, a demand for an overarching approach that provide a basis for theoretical and practical infrastructures capable of accommodating the whole range of modern software engineering practices and requirements. One approach is provided by Process-Based Software Engineering (PBSE); part of the more general trend towards a focus on process. This paper provides a review of process techniques for software engineering and a high-level perspective on PBSE. Typical approaches and techniques for the establishment, assessment, improvement and benchmarking of software engineering process systems are introduced in this paper, and many are developed further in other contributions to this volume.

The shortage of traditional web development makes researchers turn to web development using Progressive Web App (PWA) in developing a web, which has been increasingly done. PWA has the ability to function even with a low internet connection, maintain interactive user and access speeds, and provide real-time notifications. In modern web development, where the demand for data, features, and users can increase rapidly, an architecture is required to handle this problem. Microservices architecture can answer this. This research will develop a scholarship application using PWA and microservices architecture. The scholarship application was developed using Veu.js for the front end of the client application, MySQL for the application database, and the SLIM framework for microservices implementation. Furthermore, we utilized RAbbitMQ to develop a message broker and Docker for microservices contaner. The scholarship application developed using PWA technology and microservices in this research has been tested by conducting a User Acceptance Test. The results are the implementation of PWA in the scholarship application using microservice architecture has worked well, and the application performance has been able to overcome problems in terms of scalability, speed, and reliability.

В настоящее время широкое распространение получила микросервисная архитектура, появляется множество приложений (микросервисов), которые так или иначе между собой взаимодействуют. Микросервисы, как правило, объединяются в целые платформы. Встает острый вопрос взаимодействия их друг с другом, хранения и обмена справочными данными. Эталонного решения данной проблемы не существует, на данный момент, но в данной работе описан симбиоз различных подходов, а также приведена конкретная реализация – унифицированная модель справочников в микросервисной платформе, которая позволяет обмениваться справочными данными десяткам микросервисов (на момент написания статьи количество сервисов в платформе составляет 57 штук). Была спроектирована метамодель, с помощью которой описываются сущности справочников: справочники, категории, связи между справочниками и между сущностями справочников. Архитектура такой модели микросервиса справочников позволяет абстрагироваться от конкретных реализаций СУБД, таким образом не происходит «сильной связности» с SQL или NoSQL базой данных. Данный микросервис имеет искусственно введеные ограничения запись данных от сторонних микросервисов. Миграция данных осуществляется вручную посредством Liquibase скриптов, что позволяет поддерживать справочники в одинаковом состоянии на всех стендах разработки, быстро и легко восстанавливать до любого состояния слепки справочников. Дальнейшее развитие микросервиса справочников может иметь следующий вид: разработка UI форм для ручного заполнения справочников и сохранение новых данных в модели или в скрипты Liquibase, что уже на данном этапе является очень актуальной проблемой для группы сопровождения и администраторов микросервисной платформы. Today, the microservice architecture has become widespread and most popular in software engineering; many applications (microservices) are forced to communicate with each other. In the future, microservices are combined into entire application platforms. The acute issue of interaction of microservices with each other, storage and exchange of dictionary data have appeared in the minds of developers. A standard solution to this problem does not exist at the moment, but this article describes the symbiosis of various approaches, and also provides a specific implementation - a unified data model of dictionary in a microservice platform. It allows dozens of microservices to exchange dictionary data (now, the number of services in the platform is 57 pieces). This article describes the metamodel which help to design and create entities of dictionary, there are: category of dictionary, relations between categories and between directories. Such data model architecture of microservice allowed me to abstract from specific DBMS implementations, i.e. I am not hard tied on SQL or NoSQL database. This microservice has artificially introduced restrictions on data recording by other microservices. Data migration is carried out manually by Liquibase scripts, which allows maintaining dictionaries in the same state at all development stands, quickly and easily restore dictionaries to any state. Further evolution of the dictionary microservice could be as follows: the development of a user interface for filling dictionaries by administrator`s hands and saving new data in unify data models or auto generation Liquibase scripts. At this stage this problem is very urgent for the support group and administrators of the microservice platform.

One desired aspect of a self-adapting microservices architecture is the ability to continuously monitor the operational environment, detect and observe anomalous behaviour as well as implement a reasonable policy for self-scaling, self-healing, and self-tuning the computational resources in order to dynamically respond to a sudden change in its operational environment. Often the behaviour of a microservices architecture continuously changes over time and the identification of both normal and abnormal behaviours of running services becomes a challenging task. This paper proposes a self-healing Microservice architecture that continuously monitors the operational environment, detects and observes anomalous behaviours, and provides a reasonable adaptation policy using a multi-dimensional utility-based model. This model preserves the cluster state and prevents multiple actions to taking place at the same time. It also guarantees that the executed adaptation action fits the current execution context and achieves the adaptation goals. The results show the ability of this model to dynamically scale the architecture horizontally or vertically in response to the context changes.

In the CERN laboratory, users have access to a large number of different licensed software assets. The landscape of such assets is very heterogeneous including Windows operating systems, office tools and specialized technical and engineering software. In order to improve management of the licensed software and to better understand the needs of the users, it was decided to develop a Winventory application. The Winventory is a tool that gathers and presents statistics of software assets on CERN Windows machines and facilitates interaction with their individual users. The system was built based on microservices architecture pattern, an increasingly popular approach to web application development. The microservices architecture pattern separates the application into multiple independently deployable units that can be individually developed, tested and deployed. This paper presents the microservices architecture and design choices made in order to achieve a modern, maintainable and extensible system for managing licensed software at CERN.

Software Engineering (SE) as a field has grown significantly in terms of the research publications in the last few years. Criterion-based assessment of research performance of scholars, countries along with collaboration networks and links among articles are better judged using bibliometric analysis. The results proposed in this work are based on quantitative analysis and data visualisation of 150,087 scholarly articles published in last 13 years (2007–2019) across 85 research areas based on seven categories by providing a detailed and distinctive time-frame-based comparison to observe a shift in research trend in SE and its 12 distinguished sub-areas. The results of the observations proposed in this work include analysis on types of documents, yearly publication trends with results suggesting a prominent increment for the period (2015–2017) in terms of research publications, languages of research publications with findings indicating that there are articles published in languages other than English language, also, publication count-based rankings of authors, collaboration networks of countries with findings showing the supremacy of USA and China and keyword statistics.

Stack Exchange Q&A website is a major platform of sharing knowledge about number of topics in various domains like Arts, technology, science, communication, literature etc. through Questions & Answers. In this paper, we are analyzing the textual content of Software Engineering, Stack Exchange Q&A website in various dimensions. The dimensions LDA based topic modelling, temporal trends of topics over time, technology impact, technology trends and their popularity. The analysis shows that wide range of topics are discussed in the Software Engineering Q& A website amongst the most popular are Programming skills, object-oriented design and design and development.