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Continuous Formal Verification of Microservice-Based Process Flows

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Software Architecture (ECSA 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1269))

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Abstract

The microservice architectural style is often used to implement modern cloud, IoT, and large-scale distributed applications. Here software development processes are characterized by short incremental iterations, where several updates and new functionalities are continuously integrated many times a day in a agile fashion. Such a paradigm shift calls for new formal approaches to systematic (design-time and runtime) verification. This paper introduces a formal framework to apply continuous verification of microservice based applications built on top of Conductor, i.e., an open source orchestration engine of microservices workflows in use at Netflix, Inc. for their production environment. Our proposal adopts a model-driven paradigm and it leverages solid foundation from Petri nets to specify and verify the behavior of time-dependent workflows. This paper describes our approach, the current implementation, and evaluation activity conducted on a taxi-hailing application example.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    They are comparable to those of service-oriented computing  [13] and we can find their roots in the design principles of Unix  [15].

  2. 2.

    The main components of the toolchain are available as open source software at https://github.com/SELab-unimi/conductor2pn and https://maharajaframework.bitbucket.io/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Matteo Camilli

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  1. Matteo Camilli
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Correspondence to Matteo Camilli .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

    Henry Muccini

  2. University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Paris Avgeriou

  3. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Barbora Buhnova

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Javier Camara

  5. Department of Computer Science, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden

    Mauro Caporuscio

  6. University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

    Mirco Franzago

  7. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Anne Koziolek

  8. University of Bergamo, Dalmine, Italy

    Patrizia Scandurra

  9. Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy

    Catia Trubiani

  10. Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Danny Weyns

  11. Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Uwe Zdun

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Camilli, M. (2020). Continuous Formal Verification of Microservice-Based Process Flows. In: Muccini, H., et al. Software Architecture. ECSA 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1269. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59155-7_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59155-7_31

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