Transforming Service Compositions into Cloud-Friendly Actor Networks

While conversion of atomic and back-end services from centralized servers to cloud platforms has been largely successful, the composition layer, which gives the service-oriented architecture its flexibility and versatility, often remains a bottleneck. The latter can be re-engineered for horizontal and vertical scalability by moving away from coarser concurrency model that uses transactional databases for keeping and maintaining composition internal state, towards a finer-grained model of concurrency and distribution based on actors, state messaging, and non-blocking write-only state persistence. In this paper we present a scheme for automatically transforming the traditional (orchestration-style) service compositions into Cloud-friendly actor networks, which can benefit from high performance, location transparency, clustering, load balancing, and integration capabilities of modern actor systems, such as Akka. We show how such actor networks can be monitored and automatically made persistent while avoiding transactional state update bottlenecks, and that the same networks can be used for both executing compositions and their testing and simulation.