Master's thesis: Static analysis of web-scale architectures

With the ever increasing size of software systems, we see that many new software systems are distributed. Web-scale-architecture, event-driven, reactive, actor and eventual consistency are all software architectural styles and concepts that imply distributed computing.

Infrastructure as code is one of the foundations of the new wave of web scale software systems. The infrastructure of the software systems dynamically reconfigures itself to react to the demands on the system as a whole. The system can decide to instantiate new instances of a sub component, reroute requests or build a complete copy of itself in another location. These new capabilities can have unspecified interactions with the running software itself and have undesired and unexpected results. This is called emergent behavior, behavior not explicitly build into the system. As part of our ambition to build and maintain quality software systems we feel that infrastructure as code should be part of our solution architecture and we should have the same quality guarantees as the rest of the system.

To reason about these architectures we want to perform static analysis on their configuration, allowing us to detect possible issues (bottlenecks, conflicting changes, implausible values, etc.) at an early stage before running in production.

About Info Support Research Center

We anticipate on upcoming and future challenges and ensures our engineers develop cutting-edge solutions based on the latest scientific insights. Our research community proactively tackles emerging technologies. We do this in cooperation with renowned scientists, making sure that research teams are positioned and embedded throughout our organisation and our community, so that their insights are directly applied to our business. We truly believe in sharing knowledge, so we want to do this without any restrictions.

Read more about Info Support Research here.