Detecting and Resolving Coupling-Related Infrastructure as Code Based Architecture Smells in Microservice Deployments

The Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concept enables IT infrastructure to be managed as software: resources can be managed, monitored, and provisioned automatically instead of manually by developers or operations teams. Many industries have already embraced this concept widely. However, research on IaC-based deployments, particularly research focusing on loose coupling, often does not offer methods for evaluating architectural conformance, spotting architecture smells, and support for correcting the found smells. Our work strives to provide an automatic method for continuously developing microservice-based systems and the associated infrastructure. We aim to offer an automated architectural refactoring method that checks if IaC-based deployments adhere to patterns and best practices and do not contain potential architectural smells. We provide architects with viable options for enhancing architectural conformance during microservice development. In short, by continuously detecting architectural smells and suggesting possible fixes, we aim to support architecture evolution within the framework of continuous delivery practices. We evaluate our approach using three case studies and variants based on open-source microservice architectures.