Microservice-based Development: Challenges and Opportunities

Whenever you watch Netflix or order from Amazon, you use microservice-based applications. Such applications follow a SOA-inspired architectural principle of building complex systems as a composition of small, loosely coupled components that communicate with each other using language-agnostic APIs. Microservices have recently become popular in industry due to their advantages, such as greater software development agility and improved scalability of deployed applications. Yet, proper adoption of microservices induces numerous technical and organizational changes. This talk will discuss several of these challenges, based on empirical data we gathered from more than 50 industrial practitioners. It will then focus on one of the challenges in more detail: how to decompose an existing monolithic system and turn it into a microservice-based application.

Julia Rubin is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Trustworthy Software and leads a UBC Research Excellence Cluster on Trustworthy ML. Julia received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Canada and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, USA. She also spent almost 10 years in industry, working for IBM Research, where she was a research staff member and a research group manager. Julia's research interests are in software engineering, program analysis, software security, and reliability of software and AI systems. Her work in these areas won five Distinguished/Best Paper Awards at major conferences, such as ICST'21, ISSTA'18, and ASE'15. Julia serves on program committees of several flagship conferences in software engineering, such as ICSE, FSE, and ASE. She co-chaired the program committees of SPLC'14, ECMFA'14, FASE'17, CASCON'20, and co-chairs the program committee of ASE in 2022.