Special track on microservices, devops, and service-oriented architecture

Service-oriented architectures have changed our vision of the Web, bringing a paradigmatic shift in the methodologies when designing and implementing distributed systems. Originally, the Web was mainly seen as a means of presenting information to a wide spectrum of people, but service-oriented programming triggered a radical transformation of the Web towards a computational fabric where loosely coupled services interact, can be discovered and then invoked. More recently, the microservices architectural style has been proposed, where applications are developed as a collection of fine-grained services running as independent processes. Distributed applications can then be constructed from independently deployable services taking advantage of the properties of the microservice architecture (e.g., flexibility, maintainability, reusability, compositionality, and scalability) as well as the elasticity of cloud infrastructure. From the practical point of view, the deployment and maintenance of (micro)services architectures are performed using DevOps, i.e., a collection of practices linking software development (Dev) with software operations (Ops). DevOps strongly advocates for automation and monitoring at all steps of software construction, from integration, testing, releasing to deployment and infrastructure management. By using the DevOps methodology, it is possible to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality.