ClarchMap: API-oriented reconstruction of architecture for cloud-based systems

Abstract

In DevOps, practices for continuous delivery aim to minimize the risks associated with releasing software and new features. Adding automation to the process, these practices help to reduce the effort required to deploy the software without affecting the behaviour of the system. Regretfully, when developers or infrastructure administrators modify any element in a system, other elements may result in affected, thus producing errors and service interruptions. Here we present the tool Cloud architecture Mapper (ClarchMap) that determines what elements comprise a given cloud-based system and what dependencies exist among these elements. Users can take advantage of this information to analyse the impact of changes. Our approach uses different kinds of APIs to reconstruct the system architecture and visualize, and analyse the diverse software, data, and infrastructure elements therein. We have applied our approach to reconstruct and analyze the infrastructure used in a real Software as a Service application in Azure. According to this evaluation, the contributed graph-based visualizations help to detect elements and problems hard to find by hand. A video demonstrating our tool is available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXBZ4P1ZGRE