All the services large and micro: Revisiting industrial practice in services computing

Abstract

Services computing is both an academic field of study looking back at close to 15 years of fundamental research and a vibrant area of industrial software engineering. Industrial practice in this area is notorious for its ever-changing nature, with the state of the art changing almost on a yearly basis based on the ebb and flow of various hypes and trends (e.g., microservices). In this paper, we provide a look “across the wall” into industrial services computing. We conducted an empirical study based on the service ecosystem of 42 companies, and report, among other aspects, how service-to-service communication is implemented, how service discovery works in practice, what Quality-of-Service metrics practitioners are most interested in, and how services are deployed and hosted. We argue that not all assumptions that are typical in academic papers in the field are justified based on industrial practice, and conclude the paper with recommendations for future research that is more aligned with the services industry.