Europe Research Interest Group Meeting [June 2022]

Developing static analysis tools in the era of cloud-native systems

by Tomas Cerny (Baylor University, USA)

System-centric perspectives are necessary for broader reasoning of cloud-native systems for evolvability assurance. While dynamic analysis and tracing offer a certain alternative, it is limited in detail and has significant delays. Static analysis traditionally provides early feedback. However,  conventional low-level static analysis tools fail to address emerging needs and multi-codebase operability common in cloud-native systems. Static analysis approaches need to adapt to current best practices for cloud-native systems like distributed codebases, decentralization, and heterogeneous code. 

This talk shares our long-term research goals and accomplishments in this field. We introduce our prototypic intermediate representation of the system, mechanisms to extract it from heterogenous code, and practical transformations into visual representation aiding system reasoning. Finally, we aim to engage with the microservice and cloud audience and seek to identify practical community problems that could drive our future scientific efforts.

Tomas Cerny, PhD. is an assistant professor at Baylor University. He teaches software engineering and distributed systems, and together with his research team, they look into static analysis in the field of cloud-native systems. Tomas is a long-time collaborator with Red Hat Research; just this summer, he leads a team of undergraduate researchers visiting Red Hat in Brno to perform a research internship.

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