Architectural Support for DevOps in a Neo-Metropolis BDaaS Platform

Big data as a Service (BDaaS) provides a viable strategy for organizations to implement scalable, tailorable big data infrastructure and applications built on this infrastructure. New trends in the BDaaS market are moving toward an open world model -- what we call the Neo-Metropolis model -- for developing BDaaS platforms. The key to the success of such large-scale technology-agnostic platforms, we posit, is an architectural strategy revolving around microservices and DevOps. This article presents the results of an action research with a Neo-Metropolis BDaaS vendor and illustrates how architectural support for DevOps is critical in achieving desired system qualities and enabling platform success. This research contributes to illuminate best practices of DevOps, and to validate and augment a set of DevOps tactics previously developed, while adding and recategorizing new instances of well-established architectural tactics.