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Identifying Domain-Based Cyclic Dependencies in Microservice APIs Using Source Code Detectors

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Software Architecture (ECSA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12857))

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Abstract

Isolation, autonomy, and loose coupling are critical success factors of microservice architectures. Unfortunately, systems tend to become strongly coupled over time, sometimes even exhibiting cyclic communication chains, making the individual deployment of services challenging. Such chains are highly problematic when strongly coupled communication e.g. based on synchronous invocations is used, but also create complexity and maintenance issues in more loosely coupled asynchronous or event-based communication. Here, cycles only manifest on a conceptual or domain level, making them hard to track for algorithms that rely solely on static analysis. Accordingly, previous attempts to detect cycles either focused on synchronous communication or had to collect additional runtime data, which can be costly and time-consuming. We suggest a novel approach for identifying and evaluating domain-based cyclic dependencies in microservice systems based on modular, reusable source code detectors. Based on the architecture model reconstructed by the detectors, we derived a set of architectural metrics for detecting and classifying domain-based cyclical dependencies. By conducting two case studies on open-source microservice architectures, we validated the feasibility and applicability of our approach.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/pyparsing/pyparsing/.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/Microservice-API-Patterns/LakesideMutual.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/Microservice-API-Patterns/LakesideMutual.

  4. 4.

    Available as a separate branch under https://github.com/Microservice-API-Patterns/LakesideMutual/tree/spring-term-2020, last accessed on August 18, 2021.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/dotnet-architecture/eShopOnContainers, commit hash 6012fb... from April 12, 2021.

  6. 6.

    https://www.rabbitmq.com/.

  7. 7.

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-bus-messaging/.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by: FWF (Austrian Science Fund) project API-ACE: I 4268; FWF (Austrian Science Fund) project IAC\(^2\): I 4731-N; FFG (Austrian Research Promotion Agency) project DECO, no. 864707. Our work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952647 (AssureMOSS project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, Research Group Software Architecture, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Patric Genfer & Uwe Zdun

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  1. Patric Genfer
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  2. Uwe Zdun
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Correspondence to Patric Genfer or Uwe Zdun .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Systems Engineering, Technische Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Biffl

  2. University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain

    Elena Navarro

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

    Welf Löwe

  4. Design and Engineering, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

    Marjan Sirjani

  5. Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

    Raffaela Mirandola

  6. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Danny Weyns

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Genfer, P., Zdun, U. (2021). Identifying Domain-Based Cyclic Dependencies in Microservice APIs Using Source Code Detectors. In: Biffl, S., Navarro, E., Löwe, W., Sirjani, M., Mirandola, R., Weyns, D. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12857. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86044-8_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86044-8_15

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