Authors:
Nima Kaviani
1
;
Michael Maximilien
2
;
Ignacio Silva-Lepe
2
and
Isabelle Rouvellou
2
Affiliations:
1
University of British Columbia, Canada
;
2
IBM Watson Research Center, United States
Keyword(s):
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), CloudFoundry, Introspection.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
API Management
;
Cloud Applications Performance and Monitoring
;
Cloud Computing
;
Cloud Computing Enabling Technology
;
Cloud Middleware Frameworks
;
Monitoring of Services, Quality of Service, Service Level Agreements
;
Platforms and Applications
Abstract:
CloudFoundry (CF) provides an open source platform-as-a-service software for deploying scalable software
systems to the cloud. The architecture for CF is distributed by design and consists of several components which
interact with one another through a message-oriented middleware. This message-oriented distributed design
delivers on the scalability and resiliency requirements of the platform. In such a complex distributed multicomponent
system, there is a steep learning curve for software developers to understand how components
interact, what messages are exchanged between them, and how the message exchanges affect the behaviour
of the system. In particular developers find it difficult to identify the execution flows, the authentication
flows, interactions with the persistence layer, etc. We have developed a framework that allows interpreting
the behaviour of the system by analyzing the exchanged messages between components, inspecting message
contents, and extracting data and contro
l flow across components. The paramount aim is to improve developers’
understandability of the system and to examine software resiliency through approaches like bug injection
and message alterations. An initial version of our framework was released to the CF community and we have
collected feedback that indeed show that we are achieving some of our goals.
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