Keynotes
Assessing the scalability of microservice architectures
Andrea Janes @ Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences, Dornbirn (Austria)
Abstract
Microservices have emerged as an architectural style for developing maintainable and scalable applications. Assessing the performance of architecture deployment configurations — e.g., with respect to deployment alternatives — is challenging and must be aligned with the system usage in the production environment. In this talk I present an approach for using operational profiles to generate load tests to automatically assess scalability pass/fail criteria of microservice configuration alternatives. The approach provides a domain-based metric for each alternative that can, for instance, be applied to make informed decisions about the selection of alternatives and to conduct production monitoring regarding performance-related system properties, e.g., anomaly detection. We have evaluated our approach using extensive experiments in a large bare metal host environment and a virtualized environment. The talk with briefly introduce the concept of microservices, present the deployment approach and the evaluation approach based on the open source tool locust.io; it will present the tool PPTAM used to conduct the experiments and the performed data analysis.
Speaker's Bio
Andrea Janes is a senior lecturer and researcher at the FHV Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences in Dornbirn, Austria. Previously, he was a researcher at the Free University of Bolzano at the Faculty of Computer Science and a member of the Smart Data Factory, a technology transfer group within the faculty, where he acquired and led several research projects and collaborations with industry. He received the master’s degree in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria and the doctorate in computer science (with distinction) from the University of Klagenfurt (Austria). In 2020, he received the habilitation as associate professor in Italy in the field of Sistemi di elaborazione delle informazioni (09/H1), i.e., Information processing systems; in 2021, the habilitation in the field of Informatica (01/B1), i.e., Computer Science. He is particularly interested in Lean and Agile approaches to software engineering, Value-based Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, Software Testing, and in the last years - passionate about Microservices!
Monolithic to Microservice to ... Are we rolling back?
Davide Taibi @ University of Oulu, Oulu (Finland)
Abstract
Companies migrated to microservices for various reasons, often following the hype or hoping to find the silver bullet. While multiple companies had experienced important improvements in their velocity and their team independence, other companies did not achieve their expected benefits. Recently, there has been a trend of migrating microservice systems to other technologies. Serverless first, but also data meshes and, in extreme cases, even rolling back to monolithic systems. In this talk, we will discuss the most recent trends in microservices and, in particular the reasons why they moved out from traditional microservices versus other technologies.
Speaker's Bio
Davide Taibi is full Professor at the University of Oulu (Finland) where he heads the M3S Cloud research group. His research is mainly focused on the migration to cloud-native technologies. He is investigating processes, and techniques for developing Cloud Native applications, identifying cloud-native specific patterns and anti-patterns, and methods to prevent the degradation. He is member of the International Software Engineering Network (ISERN) from 2018.
Keeping expectations high in face of big challenges: managing performance in microservices architectures
Stefano Monti @ Imola Informatica SpA (Italy)
Abstract
Managing performance is hard. Managing performance in distributed, fragmented architectures such as MSAs is even harder: bottlenecks and slowdowns can happen at any point in a complex, most of the times asynchronous, interaction chain. The usual way organizations tackle performance issues is monitoring runtime expectations and addressing problems once they arise, in typical war room fashions, with huge teams involved in long, highly pressured investigation and troubleshooting sessions on the misbehaving production systems (often ending up “giving more power” to the underlying infrastructure as the default response). We believe performance (and associated costs) should be considered as a first-class citizen, starting from thorough architecture and solution design phases, and encompassing performance management and tuning throughout the entire software development lifecycle. Based on our direct experiences in a number of war rooms and our tested beliefs of better ways of designing for performance, we discuss the mindset and some approaches to enable shifting left performance management and tools in complex, distributed architectures.
Speaker's Bio
Stefano Monti is an architect and senior advisor at Imola Informatica and he is currently involved in the design and management of digital transformation programs for customers, mainly in the financial sector. His current interests relate to software development lifecycle, with a specific focus on monitoring/observability, and end-to-end software quality and performance.