SANER 2025
Tue 4 - Fri 7 March 2025 Montréal, Québec, Canada
Wed 5 Mar 2025 15:15 - 15:30 at L-1710 - Smart Contracts & Microservices Chair(s): Anthony Cleve

Microservices architecture is increasingly adopted in mod- ern software projects. Microservices deployment is often managed by tools like Spring Cloud, Consul, and Docker. Although there is exist- ing research on microservices, practical deployment challenges are still under-explored, impacting the efficiency and success of applications. In this paper, we aim to identify and understand the challenges developers encounter with microservices deployment. We analyze trends in help re- quests on Stack Overflow, one of the most popular Q&A platforms for developers, to identify and categorize these challenges and highlight the most popular and difficult ones. First, we examined 1,214 Stack Overflow posts related to microservices deployment using topic modelling based on the BERTopic method to extract and analyze challenge topics. To ob- tain a more comprehensive understanding, we also analyzed the identi- fied topics according to their popularity and difficulty. Our results reveal that discussions related to microservices deployment vary over time from 2013 to 2023. We identified nine distinct topics related to microservices deployment challenges, including deployment strategies, data manage- ment, composition and discovery, containerization, configuration, and orchestration in Kubernetes, security management, CI/CD pipeline au- tomation, exposure to external clients, and post-deployment monitoring. Results reveal that microservices containerization is the most popular topic that poses numerous challenges to many users, with 2,148 average views and a 3.19 average score. While composition and discovery and post deployment monitoring are the most challenging topics, with 78% of questions on post deployment monitoring lacking accepted answers, and 28% of questions about composition and discovery remaining unan- swered. This study identifies critical areas in microservices deployment that need further investigation, particularly, difficult and popular ones.

Wed 5 Mar

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14:00 - 15:30
Smart Contracts & MicroservicesResearch Papers / Industrial Track at L-1710
Chair(s): Anthony Cleve University of Namur
14:00
15m
Talk
LLM-based Generation of Solidity Smart Contracts from System Requirements in Natural Language: the AstraKode Case
Industrial Track
Gabriele De Vito Università di Salerno, Damiano D'Amici Damiano D'Amici, Head of Product and co-founder, AstraKode S.r.l., Fabiano Izzo Fabiano Izzo, CEO and co-founder, AstraKode S.r.l., Filomena Ferrucci University of Salerno, Dario Di Nucci University of Salerno
14:15
15m
Talk
Deep Smart Contract Intent Detection
Research Papers
Youwei Huang Institute of Intelligent Computing Technology, Suzhou, CAS, Sen Fang North Carolina State University, Jianwen Li , Bin Hu Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jiachun Tao Suzhou City University, Tao Zhang Macau University of Science and Technology
Pre-print
14:30
15m
Talk
Enhancing Microservice Migration Transformation from Monoliths with Graph Neural Networks
Research Papers
Deli Chen hainan university, Chunyang Ye Hainan University, Hui Zhou Hainan University, Shanyan Lai hainan university, Bo Li hainan university
14:45
15m
Talk
Specification Mining for Smart Contracts with Trace Slicing and Predicate Abstraction
Research Papers
Ye Liu , Yixuan Liu Nanyang Technological University, Yi Li Nanyang Technological University, Cyrille Artho KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
15:00
15m
Talk
Towards Change Impact Analysis in Microservices-based System Evolution
Research Papers
Tomas Cerny University of Arizona, Gabriel Goulis Systems and Industrial Engineering, University of Arizona, Amr Elsayed The University of Arizona
Pre-print
15:15
15m
Talk
An Empirical Study on Microservices Deployment Trends, Topics and Challenges in Stack Overflow
Research Papers
Amina Bouaziz Laval University, Mohamed Aymen saied Laval University, Mohammed Sayagh ETS Montreal, University of Quebec, Ali Ouni ETS Montreal, University of Quebec, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer University of Michigan - Flint