Structural Coupling for Microservices

Sebastiano Panichella, Mohammad Rahman, Davide Taibi

2021

Abstract

Cloud-native Applications are “distributed, elastic and horizontal-scalable systems composed of (micro)services which isolates states in a minimum of stateful components”. Hence, an important property is to ensure a low coupling and a high cohesion among the (micro)services composing the cloud-native application.. Loosely coupled and highly cohesive services allow development teams to work in parallel, reducing the communication overhead between teams. However, despite both practitioners and researchers agreement on the importance of this general property, there are no validated metrics to effectively measure or test the actual coupling level between services. In this work, we propose ways to compute and to visualize the coupling between microservices, this by extending and adapting the concepts behind the computation of the traditional structural coupling. We validate these measures with a case study involving 17 open source projects and we provide an automatic approach to measure them. The results of this study highlight how these metrics provide to practitioners a quantitative and visual views of services compositions, which can be useful to conceive advanced systems to monitor the services evolution.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Panichella S., Rahman M. and Taibi D. (2021). Structural Coupling for Microservices. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER, ISBN 978-989-758-510-4, pages 280-287. DOI: 10.5220/0010481902800287

in Bibtex Style

@conference{closer21,
author={Sebastiano Panichella and Mohammad Rahman and Davide Taibi},
title={Structural Coupling for Microservices},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,},
year={2021},
pages={280-287},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010481902800287},
isbn={978-989-758-510-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,
TI - Structural Coupling for Microservices
SN - 978-989-758-510-4
AU - Panichella S.
AU - Rahman M.
AU - Taibi D.
PY - 2021
SP - 280
EP - 287
DO - 10.5220/0010481902800287