Distributed service co-evolution based on domain objects

Abstract

Service evolution is a critical ingredient of the service lifecycle. The more our society depends on large-scale, complex service environments including cloud and mobile services, the more pressing becomes the question of how to evolve a service on the fly at runtime, without bringing whole systems to a halt, due to unintended percolation of evolution effects through service inter–dependency chains. Thus, there is an urgent need for coordinated service evolution (co-evolution). This paper contributes a conceptual solution for dynamic, on-the-fly co-evolution of services, as well as a framework that supports the engineering of such co-evolution support. Our solution is built on top of the Domain Objects architectural concept and service-oriented computing model. We also analyze the types of changes that might happen in a service and their potential impact on dependent clients and servers, and discuss the benefits of our approach on those service co-evolution scenarios.