Foundation for composable microservices for rapid synthesis of highly reliable software systems
Sung Joong Kim, Farokh Bastani · 2004
Software continues to become more and more complex due to the growing sophistication and complexity of modern applications. Furthermore, today's highly competitive business environment demands accelerated development schedules to exploit windows of opportunities. In addition, it is necessary to be able not only to achieve high quality but also to rigorously demonstrate that high quality has in fact been achieved. Thus, success in today's global marketplace requires the ability to quickly customize and adapt products for niche markets and to satisfy diverse regional reliability requirements, standards, and procedures. This research identifies several drawbacks with current software development methods and proposes a novel aspect-oriented design method to ensure that system properties can be mathematically inferred from those of its components. This will enable the development of highly dependable software systems. In particular, we address a fundamental challenge in integrating highly dependable software systems from existing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components. We have developed a method of constructing a repository of dependable orthogonal microservices that can be rapidly customized and automatically integrated together to build reliable application-specific frameworks. The method ensures that the dependability of the resulting application can be mathematically inferred from the dependability of the underlying microservices and the application-specific components. The approach has been validated for applications ranging from sensor networks to secure e-mail systems.