The goal of this framework is to find the most critical components and design issues within a distributed system.
The component (service) analysis is based on different metrics. These represent different aspects of service criticality. Criticality, in this case, is defined as probability of a failure and its impact on the whole system. Components with high criticality are mission/business critical and deserve special treatment. Another interpretation of high criticality is bad architectural design around the component, which has to be improved.
Service Criticality Tool visualizes dependency relationships within a distributed system. It identifies possible design issues on architectural level. And builds a service criticality ranking based on software and architecture metrics. This tool can help software engineers and architects by providing a basis for white box architecture analysis.
A distinction is made between software and architecture metrics.
Software metrics are calculated externally and can be imported into the tool. Reasonable software metrics are: Lines-of-Code, Test Coverage, Complexity, etc.
Architecture metrics are based on the dependency graph. There are some metrics and properties from graph theory and network analysis. All of them are calculated internally.
Along with external metrics, they get normalized and aggregated to build a ranking of the services in regard to their criticality.
These metrics are calculated by the application based on the dependency graph. Description represents a possible metric's interpretation for the domain of distributed systems.
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Degree | Number of direct communication partners of the given service |
| Out-Degree | Number of direct dependencies of the given service |
| In-Degree | Number of services which depend directly on the given one |
| Constraint | Order of constraint of dependency relations |
| Cycles | Circular dependencies |
| Katz-Centrality | Importance of the service as a dependency on the big scale (transitive dependency) |
| Effective Size | Number of independent sub networks the service is connected to |
The application consists of 3 services based on Spring Boot. PostgreSQL RDBMS is used to persist the data. The front end application is built using React and D3.
Architecture service is responsible for architecture management. Via the RESTful API, you can do CRUD operations on architecture stacks, services and dependencies between the service. Information from this service is taken to create dependency graphs, which are the basis for the analysis.
Metrics service manages internal and external metrics of the services. External metrics can be imported via the API. Internal metrics are calculated automatically based on dependency graphs. Both types of metrics get normalized and are accessible over the metrics API.
The results of the service criticality analysis are shown in the web application. Here you find all the architecture stacks, visualizations of the dependency graphs, services, and metrics.
In order to run the application on your local machine, you have to build the projects and run the whole stack using docker-compose.
- Java 8 JDK
- Maven 3.1.0+
- Docker 1.11+
- Docker Compose 1.7.1+
First, you have to build the components. Therefore run:
mvn clean packagedocker-compose will create 4 Docker containers, link them, bootstrap a database with sample data and start the components:
docker-compose up --buildNow, the web application is accessible on http://localhost:8080. Architectures and Metrics API can be used under http://localhost:8001/architectures and http://localhost:8002/metrics respectively.
If your docker host is not your localhost (e.g. MacOS), replace localhost in the link with the docker machine IP address:
docker-machine ip ${machine_name}First, we create a new architecture (meta information about a distributed system):
curl -X POST
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
-d ’{
"name" : "service-criticality-framework",
"description" : "Framework for Service Criticality Calculations"
}’
${base_url}/architecturesAnd add some components to the architecture:
curl -X POST
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
-d '{
"name": "metrics",
"description": "Metrics Service"
}'
${base_url}/architectures/${architecture_id}/servicescurl -X POST
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
-d '{
"name": "arch-stacks",
"description": "Architecture Stacks Service"
}'
${base_url}/architectures/${architecture_id}/servicesNext, we define dependency relationships between the services:
curl -X POST ${base_url}/architectures/${architecture_id}
/services/${service_id}
/dependencies/${depends_on_service_id}We can check created architecture by calling the architectures endpoint:
curl -X GET ${base_url}/architectures/${architecture_id}(Optional) we can add some metrics which were calculated externally:
curl -X POST
-H "Content-Type: application/json"
-d '{
"name": "test-coverage",
"architectureId": ${architecture_id},
"serviceId": ${service_id},
"value": 0.85
}'
${base_url}/metrics/Now, Service Criticality Application will calculate all the defined metrics. The metric values will be normalized and aggregated afterwords. Finally, dependency graph visualisation, metrics and service ranking is available in the web application.
To compare the results of the Service Criticality App to facts (bug database or experts opinion), evaluation-tool can be used. This tool calculates correlations between the data sets.
The MIT License (MIT) Copyright © 2016 Maxim Tschumak, maxim.tschumak@gmail.com
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