Framework for application topology discovery to enable migration of business processes to the cloud

Abstract

Today, enterprises often use large and complex software systems to support their Business Processes. These software systems usually run over years and decades and have gone through various changes and modifications in order to be able to cope with changing business requirements. Successful software applications usually grow and evolve over time, and so does their architecture. The amount of modifications can reach dimensions where the resulting architecture of the software system has little in common with the originally designed one. Knowing the overall architecture of the system is crucial for its management, especially when it comes to the migration of parts of the application or the application as a whole to another IT infrastructure, such as a Cloud infrastructure. Before an application can be migrated, its architecture has to be obtained in its current state, commonly known as the process of Software Architecture Reconstruction (SAR). This is usually achieved by running different internal programs on the program code to gather as much information as possible on the various applications and subsequently visualizing the results. In contrast to internal discovery, external discovery analyzes which network accessible sources provide information for a detailed picture of an application topology, e.g. a web server is not identified by looking at its source code (or code running on the virtual machine) but by issuing HTTP requests to query the server for information. This diploma thesis focuses on external application topology discovery in service-oriented applications that are defined in WS-BPEL and orchestrate multiple lower level Web services. The goal is to research and evaluate ways for external discovery of application topologies and the development of a prototypical, plugin-based framework that manages the topology information in a global model, to facilitate the migration of the application or parts of it to a cloud.