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A Formal Framework for Specifying and Verifying Microservices Based Process Flows

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Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10729))

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Abstract

The microservices architectural style is changing the way in which software is perceived, conceived and designed. Thus, there is a call for techniques and tools supporting the problem of specifying and verifying communication behavior of microservice systems. We present a formal semantics based on Petri nets for microservices based process flows specified using the Conductor orchestration language: a JSON-based domain specific language designed by Netflix, Inc. We give a formal semantics in terms of a translation from Conductor specifications into Time Basic Petri net models, i.e., Petri nets supporting the definition of temporal constraints. The Petri net model can be used for computer aided verification purposes by means of well-known techniques implemented by powerful, off-the-shelf model checking tools.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Conductor2Pn has been released as open-source software. It is available for download at: https://bitbucket.org/seresearch_unimi/conductor2pn.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Matteo Camilli, Carlo Bellettini, Lorenzo Capra & Mattia Monga

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  1. Matteo Camilli
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  2. Carlo Bellettini
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  3. Lorenzo Capra
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  4. Mattia Monga
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Correspondence to Matteo Camilli .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan

    Antonio Cerone

  2. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Povo, Italy

    Marco Roveri

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Camilli, M., Bellettini, C., Capra, L., Monga, M. (2018). A Formal Framework for Specifying and Verifying Microservices Based Process Flows. In: Cerone, A., Roveri, M. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10729. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74781-1_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74781-1_14

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