An Evaluation of Modeling Options for Cloud-native Application Architectures to Enable Quality Investigations
Karolin Dürr, Robin Lichtenthäler · 2022
Cloud-native as a style to build web applications embraces the potential of cloud computing. A possibility to evaluate software architectures of cloud-native applications according to quality aspects would be beneficial to developers, but is challenging due to the thematic breadth of cloud-native ranging from design to operation of applications. This work therefore evaluates existing architecture description languages according to their suitability for representing those architectural aspects specific to the cloud-native style. The evaluation is driven by a recently proposed quality model for which a suitable architectural modeling option is needed. We find that several existing languages are suitable as a basis for implementing an extension specific to the quality model. We choose TOSCA as an established standard to implement such an extension with corresponding tooling support.