Extending the OSLC standard for ECA-based automation in DevOps environments

Abstract: The DevOps paradigm is taking over software development systems, helping businesses increase efficiency, accelerate production, and adapt quickly to market changes. However, adopting these principles can be challenging. Practitioners often face an important issue known as vendor lock-in caused by the cost of tool replacement. In addition, automating the processes that involve these tools also requires investment. These issues could be addressed by standardizing service interfaces to facilitate their integration. Linked Data is an attractive choice for implementing such a standard without sacrificing versatility. An exciting and promising proposal in this direction is the OSLC standard specification. Its purpose is to build an environment where services can interoperate using standard Linked Data models. However, the current specification version still lacks standard definitions for concepts that are critical to automating the execution of actions in fast-changing environments. Therefore, this paper proposes a new specification to extend OSLC, based on the ECA model, for event-based interoperable automation, especially for DevOps environments, which are our motivational scenario. A simple DevOps architecture is built as a prototype to validate the proposed model. Using that architecture, the proposed model is validated in a real-world workflow to prove its contribution to the OSLC standard and the DevOps field.