A note on homogeneous integration

This is a follow-on to my earlier post on automatic application modernisation. 

In application modernisation the goal is to reduce a large monolithic application to a modular structure which can be deployed in containers and managed separately, e.g. with Kubernetes. The conventional approach relies on technologies such as web APIs or microservices to integrate the components. In the blog post I showed how laborious this process is, and proposed an automatic approach (research in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London). 

In this post I want to enumerate other of the advantages of the automatic approach, noting that application modernisation is not the only instance when integration is an issue. Another situation when a number of disparate application need to be integrated into a coherent whole: Internet of Things (IoT). I am particularly thinking "smart manufacturing". Of course in application modernisation we start with a homogeneous code base, so a language-specific methodology is possible. In IoT this is not always possible. However, JVMs are quite commonly available on "smart devices" so a JVM-specific approach should be often possible. Even if only some devices are JVM-enabled, integrating them should be much easier using the automatic approach rather than conventional (e.g. microservices) techniques. 

But integration is integration, whether we talk about containerised applications or about communicating smart devices. The layered approach which involves creating, sending, receiving, and decoding messages is neatly subsumed by method calls. Method calls are not only more concise, as they represent a higher level of integration, but are also more secure because of language syntax and type checking. 

In fact let us go through all the criticisms of microservice-based integration and see how mokapot solves that problem:

• Information barriers: The automatic approach is seamless, so no barriers appear
• Testing and development: With automatic integration, the behaviour of a multi-device integrated application is consistent to running the entire application on a single node (e.g. an integration server). So development and testing can be carried out on a single node, as if the application was monolithic.
• Centralised logging and metrics: It is generally desirable that operational data is collected centrally rather than locally on devices. Mokapot has this facility built in. This is used to enable the next bullet point. 
• Moving responsibilities between services: Deciding what functionality is assigned to what service is a major upfront commitment, which is almost irreversible. The automatic approach doesn't just make this a non issue, but we provide an automatic tool (filtr) which can suggest optimal deployment based on collected runtime data (profiling). 
• Development and support of many services is more challenging if they are built with different tools and technologies: A homogeneous, automatic, language-based approach makes this again a non-issue.
• Resilience and fault tolerance: The communication protocols used by Mokapot is flexible, robust, and configurable. Unrecoverable errors are propagated as runtime exceptions, that can be handled programmatically by other components or by an integration server.
• Packaging and deployment: With Mokapot these steps are greatly simplified. In particular the deployment of software updates is much more secure, as inadvertent interface changes would lead directly to compilation errors, rather than costlier runtime errors.