@conference {2018:map:icsoc, title = {Guiding Architectural Decision Making on Quality Aspects of Microservice APIs}, booktitle = {16th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2018)}, volume = {11236}, year = {2018}, month = {November}, pages = {73-89}, publisher = {Springer}, organization = {Springer}, address = {Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China}, abstract = {Microservice APIs represent the client perspective on microservice-based software architecture design and related practices. Major issues in API design concern the quality aspects of the API. However, it is not well understood today what the established practices related to those quality aspects are, how these practices are related, and what the major decision drivers are. This leads to great uncertainty in the design process. In this paper, we report on a qualitative, in-depth study of 31 widely used APIs plus 24 API specifications, standards, and technologies. In our study we identified six recurring architectural design decisions in two API design contexts with a total of 40 decision options and a total of 47 decision drivers. We modelled our findings in a formal, reusable architectural decision model. We measured the uncertainty in the resulting design space with and without use of our model, and found that a substantial uncertainty reduction can be potentially achieved by applying our model. }, keywords = {API, Microservices, quality}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-03596-9_5}, author = {Uwe Zdun and Mirko Stocker and Olaf Zimmermann and Cesare Pautasso and Daniel L{\"u}bke} } @conference {2018:map:europlop, title = {Interface Quality Patterns --- Crafting and Consuming Message-Based Remote APIs}, booktitle = {23rd European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP)}, year = {2018}, month = {July}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {Kloster Irsee, Germany}, abstract = {The design and evolution of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in microservices architectures is challenging. General design issues in integration and programming have been covered in great detail in many pattern languages since the beginnings of the patterns movement, and service-oriented infrastructure design patterns have also been published in the last decade. However, the interface representations (i.e., the content of message payloads) have received less attention. We presented five structural representation patterns in our previous work; in this paper we continue our coverage of the API design space and propose five interface quality patterns that deal with the observable aspects of quality-attribute-driven interface design for efficiency, security, and manageability: An API Key allows API providers to identify clients. Providers may offer rich data contracts in their responses, which not all consumers might need. A Wish List allows the client to request only the attributes in a response data set that it is interested in. If a client makes many API calls, the provider can employ a Rate Limit and bill clients according to a specified Rate Plan . A provider has to provide a high-quality service while at the same time having to use its available resources economically. The resulting compromise is expressed in a provider{\textquoteright}s Service Level Agreement. }, keywords = {interfaces, Microservices, patterns, quality}, author = {Mirko Stocker and Olaf Zimmermann and Daniel L{\"u}bke and Uwe Zdun and Cesare Pautasso} }