A Reference Architecture and Modelling Principles for Architectural Stability based on Self-Awareness: Case of Cloud Architectures

Abstract

With the increased dependence on so ware, there is a pressing need for engineering long-lived so ware. As architectures have a profound e ect on the life-span of the so ware and the provisioned quality of service, stable architectures are signi cant assets. Architectural stability tends to re ect the success of the system in supporting continuous changes without phasing-out. e behavioural aspect of stability is essential for seamless operation, to continuously keep the provision of quality requirements stable and prevent architecture's dri ing and phasing-out. In this paper, we introduce a reference architecture and model for stability. Speci cally, we leverage on the self-awareness principles and runtime goals modelling to explicitly support architectural stability. To illustrate the applicability and evaluate the proposed approach, we consider the case of cloud architectures. e experimental results show that our approach increases the e ciency of the architecture in keeping the expected behaviour stable during runtime operation.CCS Concepts: •So ware and its engineering → So ware architectures; Designing so ware; •Computing methodologies → Distributed computing methodologies;