IAC2
Infrastructure-as-code Architecture Decision Compliance
About the Project
lnfrastructure-as-code (laC) helps practitioners to automatically provision and manage IT infrastructures at scale, rather than using manual processes. The promise of laC is easy, rapid, secure, reliable, and repeatable IT infrastructure provisioning and management.
In laC design and development many complex architectural design decisions (ADD) are made for the laC system, the underlying infrastructure, and the software system to be delivered. Today foundations to make the (often huge) complexity of laC manageable are missing, leading to low quality, high risks, and high costs/efforts in laC design and development. The project has the objective to develop foundational concepts and methods to address these research gaps by studying the following research questions:
RQ1: How can the informal laC established practices documented in the literature today be specified in a rigorous way?
RQ2: How can a broad set of laC code and especially architecture smells and patterns be identified and detected in a systematic and automated fashion?
RQ3: How can the enormous complexity of large-scale laC architectures be tackled through evidence-based decision making?
To address the research questions, the project aims to reduce complexity and improve quality through rigorous laC ADD compliance specifications, and reduce risks and uncertainties by basing these specifications on established pattems and bad smells. Based on this foundation, it aims to provide means for precise identification of these pattems and bad smells in laC code and architectures, and to provide automatic detection in laC code and architectures. Together these contributions will enable improving quality through precise identification and automatic detection, and the reduction of risks and uncertainties by replacing manual processes, which also reduces the necessary costs and efforts especially in maintaining complex laC architectures. Finally, the project aims to provide novel means for continuously measuring and monitoring laC compliance improvements and degradations, thus enabling evidence-based improvement of the architecture. All project results will be evaluated in various empirical studies.
This project is funded by Austrian Science Fund (FWF), project nr. I 4731-N, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), project nr. 314720630.
It is a collaboration between the research group Software Architecture of the University of Vienna, led by Uwe Zdun, and the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems of the University of Stuttgart, led by Frank Leymann. The project commenced in December 2020.
Team Members
Research Group Software Architecture | University of Vienna: https://swa.cs.univie.ac.at/
Institute of Architecture of Application Systems | University of Stuttgart: https://www.iaas.uni-stuttgart.de/en/institute/
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Uwe Zdun
Universität Wien | Research Group Software Architecture
Währingerstraße 29, 1090 Vienna, Austria, Room: 5.29
uwe.zdun@univie.ac.at
T +43-1-4277-78510
Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Frank Leymann
Universität Stuttgart | Institute of Architecture of Application Systems
Universitätsstraße 38, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany, Room: 1.359
Leymann@iaas.uni-stuttgart.de
T +49-711-685-88470
Evangelos Ntentos, MSc
Universität Wien | Research Group Software Architecture
Währingerstraße 29, 1090 Vienna, Austria, Room: 5.40
evangelos.ntentos@univie.ac.at
T +43-1-4277-78545
Dr. rer. nat. Uwe Breitenbücher
Universität Stuttgart | Institute of Architecture of Application Systems
Universitätsstraße 38, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany, Room: 1.352
uwe.breitenbuecher@iaas.uni-stuttgart.de
T +49-711-685-88261
Kirill Ponomarev
Universität Wien | Research Group Software Architecture
Währingerstraße 29, 1090 Vienna, Austria
kirill.ponomarev@univie.ac.at
Ghareeb Falazi, M.Sc.
Universität Stuttgart | Institute of Architecture of Application Systems
Universitätsstraße 38, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany, Room: 1.318
ghareeb.falazi@iaas.uni-stuttgart.de
T +49-711-685-88477
Publications
Ghareeb Falazi, Lukas Harzenetter, Kálmán Képes, Frank Leymann, Evangelos Ntentos, Uwe Zdun, Uwe Breitenbücher, Martin Becker, Elena Heldwein. Compliance Management of IaC-Based Cloud Deployments During Runtime. The 16th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2023), 4 – 7 December 2023, Taormina (Messina), Italy (2023).
Pierre-Jean Quéval, Uwe Zdun. Extracting the Architecture of Microservices: An Approach for Explainability and Traceability. European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA), 18-22 Sep 2023, Istanbul, Turkey (2023).
Amirali Amiri, Uwe Zdun. Cost-Aware Multifaceted Reconfiguration of Service- and Cloud-Based Dynamic Routing Applications. IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2-8 July 2023, Chicago, Illinois USA (2023).
Evangelos Ntentos, Uwe Zdun, Falazi Ghareeb, Uwe Breitenbücher, Frank Leymann. Detecting and Resolving Coupling-Related Infrastructure as Code Based Architecture Smells in Microservice Deployments. 2023 IEEE 16th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2-8 July 2023, Chicago, USA (2023).
Lukas Harzenetter, Uwe Breitenbücher, Ghareeb Falazi, Frank Leymann, Adrian Wersching. Automated Detection of Design Patterns in Declarative Deployment Models. In: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility Cloud Computing (UCC 2021), ACM, 2021.
Vladimir Yussupov, Uwe Breitenbücher, Antonio Brogi, Lukas Harzenetter, Frank Leymann, Jacopo Soldani. Serverless or Serverful? A Pattern-based Approach for Exploring Hosting Alternatives. In: Proceedings of the 16th Symposium and Summer School on Service-Oriented Computing (SummerSOC 2022), Springer, 2022.
Uwe Zdun, Pierre-Jean Quèval, Georg Simhandl, Riccardo Scandariato, Somik Chakravarty, Marjan Jelic, Aleksandar Jovanovic. Microservice Security Metrics for Secure Communication, Identity Management, and Observability. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 32(1). pp. 1-34 ISSN 1049-331X Association for Computing Machinery (2023).
Amirali Amiri, Uwe Zdun. Tool Support for the Adaptation of Quality of Service Trade-Offs in Service- and Cloud-Based Dynamic Routing Architectures. European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA), 18-22 Sep 2023, Istanbul, Turkey (2023).
Uwe Zdun, Pierre-Jean Quéval, Georg Simhandl, Riccardo Scandariato, Somik Chakravarty, Marjan Jelic, Aleksandar Jovanovic. Detection Strategies for Microservice Security Tactics. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, ISSN 1545-5971 IEEE (2023).
Evangelos Ntentos, Uwe Zdun, Jacopo Soldani, Antonio Brogi. Assessing Architecture Conformance to Coupling-Related Infrastructure-as-Code Best Practices: Metrics and Case Studies. 16th European Conference on Software Architecture, 19.09.2022 – 23.09.2022, Prague, Czech Republic (2022).
Patric Genfer, Uwe Zdun. Avoiding Excessive Data Exposure Through Microservice APIs. 16th European Conference on Software Architecture, September 19 – 23, 2022, Prague, Czech Republic (2022).
Evangelos Ntentos, Uwe Zdun, Ghareeb Falazi, Uwe Breitenbücher, Frank Leymann. Assessing Architecture Conformance to Security-Related Practices in Infrastructure as Code Based Deployments. IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2022), 11-16 July 2022, Barcelona, Spain (2022).
Ghareeb Falazi, Uwe Breitenbücher, Frank Leymann, Miles Stötzner, Evangelos Ntentos, Uwe Zdun, Martin Becker, Elena Heldwein. On Unifying the Compliance Management of Applications Based on IaC Automation. 1st International Workshop on the Foundations of Infrastructure Specification and Testing, 12 March 2022, Virtual (2022).
Evangelos Ntentos, Sebastian Geiger, Uwe Zdun, Konstantinos Plakidas. Evaluating and Improving Microservice Architecture Conformance to Architectural Design Decisions. Service-Oriented Computing – 19th International Conference, ICSOC 2021, November 22-25, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2021).
Evangelos Ntentos, Sebastian Meixner, Uwe Zdun, Konstantinos Plakidas, Sebastian Geiger, Patric Genfer, Wilhelm Hasselbring. Detector-based component model abstraction for microservice-based systems. Computing, 103 pp. 2521-2551 ISSN 0010-485X Springer (2021).
Patric Genfer, Uwe Zdun. Identifying Domain-Based Cyclic Dependencies in Microservice APIs Using Source Code Detectors. 15th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA) 2021, 13-17 Sep 2021, virtual (2021).