Tag: observability

The Journey from Offline to Online Conformance Checking for Microservice Applications

Posted on by bennyakesson

Ricardo Andrade has successfully defended his master thesis “Real-Time Conformance Checking for Microservice Applications“. This thesis was done in the context of the ArchViews project together with Thales. The academic supervisor was ESI colleague and TU/e professor Johan Lukkien and the daily supervision at ESI was done by myself and Ben Pronk.

The thesis addresses the shift from monolithic architectures to microservice architectures in order to manage the complexities and dependencies that emerge as systems grow and incorporate new features. A significant gap identified in the management of microservice applications is the lack of effective conformance checking techniques that can verify whether the execution of microservices aligns with their specification. To address this, the thesis proposes an innovative solution by developing an online conformance checker specifically designed for microservice applications. The project begins with the creation of an offline conformance checker that evaluates conformance using execution traces and sequence diagrams. The work then progresses to an online conformance checker, significantly improving performance and delivering conformance results within approximately 30 seconds per trace. This rapid response time meets the requirement for swift identification and correction of non-conforming sequences, thereby offering a practical and effective tool for managing microservice applications.

Ricardo presented his work very well using beautifully prepared slides. He confidently answered questions from the audience and the examination committee and left the session with a good grade. Ricardo is now moving on from his studies to start his career at CGI. We wish him the best of luck in his future career.

Jesse Liauw-A-Fong Defends Master’s Thesis on Local Anomaly Detection in Smart Public Transport Vehicles

Posted on by bennyakesson

Yesterday, Jesse Liauw-A-Fong, a student of the Master of Software Engineering program at UvA, defended his thesis Local Anomaly Detection in Smart Public Transport Vehicles. This research was conducted externally at a company called Ximedes. Jessie’s research is addressing the problem of detecting anomalies, such as a loss of cloud connection, in Smart Public Transport Vehicles (SPTV), such as buses, trams, and metros, comprising many complex heterogeneous systems. It emphasizes the importance of local, context-aware anomaly detection due to the dynamic nature of SPTVs and explores the generalization of anomaly detection, particularly addressing performance, normal region, and quality challenges. The research proposes a unified data collection framework comparing agent-based and agent-less methods, advocating for an agent-based approach for its adaptability and integration ease. It also quantitatively evaluates three local anomaly detection algorithms on real data from a specific bus line. We thank Jessie for his contributions to our research and wish him the best of luck in his future career.