B5474 - ARCHITETTURE SOFTWARE A MICROSERVIZI

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, students know the main aspects of the analysis, design and implementation of service-based software architectures, with both a microservices approach and enterprise SOA; they also know how to model and support the execution of business processes, appropriately integrating the services that compose them. They can design and implement such complex architectures, also supporting their execution within virtualized infrastructures, through the application of practices, patterns and appropriate technological solutions.

Course contents

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are used to build large software systems that operate across multiple organizations (as is the case in the enterprise environment) but also as a basic structure to build flexible and extremely scalable applications (as in the case of microservices).

Designing this class of systems and reasoning about their properties requires the use of appropriate abstractions and modeling techniques.

In this course we will see how service and process abstractions can interoperate to describe complex distributed systems and we will see modeling techniques based on these abstractions that help design them.
We will learn how to model processes (using BPMN), services (using UML) and how to model the interaction between processes and services and between different services through choreographies.

We will see how to exploit these techniques to design applications adhering to the service-oriented architectural style both across-enterprises and through microservices (also by adopting specific patterns).
We will also see in practice the protocols and the technologies that can be used for their implementation; in particular for the technologies to support web services we will see SOAP / WSDL and the RESTful style; for microservices we will see the use of containers (eg Docker), microservice orchestrators (eg Kubernetes), service meshes (eg Linkerd) and serialization technologies (eg Protobuf). As far as microservices are concerned, we will try in particular to understand the strengths and weaknesses of this class of applications and we will understand how to build systems that are both scalable and reliable.
To facilitate the prompt realization of examples of some of the technologies related to web services as they are introduced, we will use the Jolie language which allows rapid prototyping of SOA solutions.
Below is a list of the main topics of the course:

• Enterprise software systems, architecture and modeling

• Business Process Management e BPMN

• SOA/Coreografie

• Web services (SOAP/WSLD/RESTful/gRPC)

• Microservices properties, design, patterns and implementation

• Virtualized infrastructures supporting SOAs: containers (Docker), distributed containers (Kubernetes)

• Jolie
  

Readings/Bibliography

• Michael Papazoglou, "Web Services and SOA: Principles and Technology", 2nd ed. 2013, ISBN 9780273732167
• Mathias Weske, “Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures”, 3rd ed. 2019, ISBN 9783662594315

Teaching methods

Lectures and excercises

Assessment methods

Submission and discussion of a project. The evaluation will consider the completeness and correctness of the submitted material, adherence to the practices covered in class, the ability to connect the various topics addressed in the course, and the use of critical thinking.

The grading of optional homework assignments throughout the course can result in a bonus of up to 1 point in the evaluation.

Office hours

See the website of Davide Rossi

See the website of Ivan Lanese