An Evaluation of Modeling Options for Cloud-native Application Architectures to Enable Quality Investigations

Cloud-native as a style to build web applications
embraces the potential of cloud computing. A possibility to
evaluate software architectures of cloud-native applications ac-
cording to quality aspects would be beneficial to developers, but is
challenging due to the thematic breadth of cloud-native ranging
from design to operation of applications. This work therefore
evaluates existing architecture description languages according
to their suitability for representing those architectural aspects
specific to the cloud-native style. The evaluation is driven by a
recently proposed quality model for which a suitable architectural
modeling option is needed. We find that several existing languages
are suitable as a basis for implementing an extension specific
to the quality model. We choose TOSCA as an established
standard to implement such an extension with corresponding
tooling support.