Agility with Microservices Programming 2020
Agile architecture does not necessarily emerge from the use of agile development practices, it needs to be deliberately sought after. This often means creating systems as sets of small, independent components that collaborate to provide the desired functionality. Such components are usually loosely-coupled and expose well-defined APIs that are accessible over standard communication protocols and data formats – they can be individually developed and tested, they can be easily replaced by alternative implementations if needed, and they provide great flexibility when deploying and scaling the system.
This style of architecture is often described as microservices. Essentially, microservices decompose a system into an architecture of standalone modules that 1) are simpler to maintain and evolve, 2) scale efficiently, and 3) can be reused as building blocks for other architectures. Transitioning to a microservice architecture is crucial for companies in highly-competing markets, where agility and flexibility of software systems become a critical asset to establish leadership.
While microservices are a solution for maintainability, evolvability, scalability, and reuse, they come at a cost: an increased complexity that calls for an improvement of the current techniques for software construction and advanced engineering practices.
The AMP workshop aims at collecting original work on the science and engineering of Microservices Programming using Agile principles and practices and/or with the goal of supporting Agility:
- Design and implementation of microservice architectures;
- Empirical studies of microservices;
- Software engineering methods for microservices;
- Approaches to refactoring towards microservice architectures;
- Orchestration techniques for microservices;
- Continuous integration/delivery approaches for microservices;
- Security in microservices;
- Formal models for microservices;
- Verification of microservice systems;
- Programming languages and techniques for microservices;
- Testing for microservices.
Brief Summary of the “live” part of the AMP 2020 Workshop
The “live” part of the AMP 2020 workshop took place on Friday June 12th, 2020. The event, as the principal co-located conference XP 2020, happened online due to the COVID-19 situation. Despite the change of medium, the attendees, the authors, and the chairs enjoyed an inspiring and well-participated session of presentations with fruitful discussions and feedback.
We also took the chance for a photo opportunity - we had around 35 participants but unfortunately we could not fit them all in one window!
After this first part, AMP continues with a second, 3-week asynchronous phase where authors of accepted papers work on preparing their initial submissions for the camera ready and authors of accepted extended abstracts have the chance to improve and mature their contributions. All communications will be open, so that attendees and others interested in joining the discussion can read any contribution and add their questions and comments.