Adaptation of Service-Based Systems

Abstract

The advances in modern technology development and future technology changes dictate new challenges and requirements to the engineering and provision of services and service-based systems (SBS). These services and systems should become drastically more flexible; they should be able to operate and evolve in highly dynamic environments and to adequately react to various changes in these environments. In these settings, adaptability becomes a key feature of services as it provides a way for an application to continuously change itself in order to satisfy new contextual requirements. Events and conditions triggering application adaptation include: changes in the infrastructural layer of the application due to quality of service changes; changes of the (hybrid) application context and location; changes of the user types, preferences, and constraints that require application customization and personalization as a means to adapt the application behavior to a particular user; changes in the functionalities provided by the component services that requires modifying the way in which services are composed and coordinated; and changes in the way the service is being used and managed by its consumers, which in turn leads to changes in the application requirements

Towards a framework for monitoring cloud application platforms as sensor networks

“…There are a number of taxonomies and classifications discussing existing approaches to the monitoring and adaptation of service-based enviroments (we refer the interested reader to [15]). We highlight here two approaches that most closely relate to our own.…”

“…In a broad sense, then, monitoring may be defined as the process of collecting and reporting relevant information about the execution and evolution of a computer system, and can be performed by any mechanism capable of checking whether the currently observed situation meets expectations [15]. 9 These monitoring processes typically target the collection of data concerning a specific artefact, the monitored subject [5].…”

“…This application has several web dynos (computational instances for processing incoming HTTP requests) and several worker dynos (computational 9 We focus in this paper on run-time monitoring. Related activities can also include such techniques as post-mortem log analysis, data mining, and online or offline testing-the interested reader is referred to [15]. 10 Intrusive monitoring requires the monitored subject to be instrumented with probes to facilitate inspection of its characteristics.…”

Variability in quality attributes of service-based software systems: A systematic literature review

“…Moreover, based on Kitchenham et al, their study cannot be considered as a systematic literature review but as an informal literature survey [13]. Similarly, Kazhamiakin et al studied adaptation of service-based systems in an informal review [34].…”

Research challenges on online service quality prediction for proactive adaptation

“…In such a dynamic environment, the system cannot remain unchanged; the short-term adaptations applied to process and service instances should be used to derive long-term system changes, i.e., to predict beneficial evolutions of the system. In fact, providing support for longterm adaptation is becoming one of the main requirements for managing the life-cycle of dynamic systems [25]. In particular, success cases and best practices derived from the execution and adaptation history should be used as training cases for evolution mechanisms in order to progressively improve the system.…”