Challanges in services research: A software architecture perspective

Cloud computing and Internet of Things are imposing a dramatic change in software development and delivery. Moreover, ICT solutions are paving innovation in every sector and therefore becoming a business factor for the success of any enterprise. The implications are manifold since technical issues need to be harmonised with social, organisational and legal aspects. In this paper we illustrate and comment the current trends to identify research directions to build services as comprehensive components accessible via APIs. The goal is to deliver services ecosystems, which call for open platforms to manage services that can connect and interact via shared protocols in dynamic heterogeneous contexts. Machine-readable semantic descriptions, microservices (single-function services), and containers (independent units of deployment) are discussed as building blocks for software architectures of the future.