Architecture Description Language for Incremental Integration of Cloud Services Architectures

Abstract

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) together with agile development practices have shown a largely favorable strategy for organizations looking for improving time-to-market and business agility. SOA is an architectural style for building software applications using coarse-grained services which are bind together through orchestration or choreography mechanisms. Agile development methods promote early and continuous increments which means that successive cloud service increments need to be integrated into an existing cloud services architecture. This paper presents an Architecture Description Language (ADL), as an extension of the SoaML language, to specify how an increment architecture will be integrated into an existing cloud services architecture. In addition, we introduce a support tool that uses this specification to automatically generate: i) the new services choreography; and ii) the deployment and needed reconfiguration scripts that change service invocations according to the integration specification. The use of this ADL is shown in the Microsoft Azure © platform using an excerpt of a reservation system for a travel operator as an illustrative example.