A Qualitative Literature Review on Microservices Identification Approaches

Abstract

Microservices has become a widely used and discussed architectural style for designing modern applications due to advantages like granular scalability and maintainability. However, it is still a complex task decomposing an application into microservices. Software architects often design architectures manually. In this paper we give a state-of-the-art overview of current approaches to identifying microservices. Therefore we use a literature review and classify the content based on the software development process.

The main results are that mostly monolithic artifacts are used for starting with microservice decomposition. Data-intensive applications are less focused. Rule-based and clustering algorithms are suitable ways to find microservice candidates. Both researchers and software architects profit from this overview. Practically it supports choosing suitable approaches considering aspects like cohesion, coupling, workload, deployment and further quality criteria for each phase during the software development process.

A Selected Studies

The selected studies are listed below and in reverse chronological order.

Key	Study
P31	Abdullah, M., Iqbal, W., Erradi, A.: Unsupervised learning approach for web application auto-decomposition into microservices. Journal of Systems and Software (2019)
P30	Li, S., Zhang, H., Jia, Z., Li, Z., Zhang, C., Li, J., Gao, Q., Ge, J., Shan, Z.: A dataflow-driven approach to identifying microservices from monolithic applications. Journal of Systems and Software (2019)
P29	Tserpes, K.: stream-MSA: A microservices’ methodology for the creation of short, fast-paced, stream processing pipelines. ICT Express (2019)
P28	Alturki, B., Reiff-Marganiec, S., Perera, C., De, S.: Exploring the Effectiveness of Service Decomposition in Fog Computing Architecture for the Internet of Things. IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing (2019)
P27	Kaplunovich, A.: ToLambda-Automatic Path to Serverless Architectures. In: 2019 IEEE/ACM 3rd International Workshop on Refactoring (IWoR), pp. 1–8 (2019)
P26	Sharma, S., Uniyal, N., Tola, B., Jiang, Y.: On Monolithic and Microservice Deployment of Network Functions. In: 2019 IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft), pp. 387–395 (2019)
P25	Jin, W., Liu, T., Cai, Y., Kazman, R., Mo, R., Zheng, Q.: Service Candidate Identification from Monolithic Systems based on Execution Traces. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2019)
P24	Gouigoux, J.; Tamzalit, D.: “Functional-First" Recommendations for Beneficial Microservices Migration and Integration Lessons Learned from an Industrial Experience. In: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C), pp. 182–186 (2019)
P23	Carvalho, L., Garcia, A., Assunção, W.K.G., Bonifácio, R., Tizzei, L.P., Colanzi, T.E.: Extraction of Configurable and Reusable Microservices from Legacy Systems: An Exploratory Study. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A, pp. 26–31. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2019)
P22	Knoche, H., Hasselbring, W.: Using Microservices for Legacy Software Modernization. IEEE Softw. (2018)
P21	Shimoda, A., Sunada, T.: Priority Order Determination Method for Extracting Services Stepwise from Monolithic System. In: 2018 7th International Congress on Advanced Applied Informatics (IIAI-AAI), pp. 805–810 (2018)
P20	Jin, W., Liu, T., Zheng, Q., Cui, D., Cai, Y.: Functionality-Oriented Microservice Extraction Based on Execution Trace Clustering. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), pp. 211–218 (2018)
P19	Kamimura, M., Yano, K., Hatano, T., Matsuo, A.: Extracting Candidates of Microservices from Monolithic Application Code. In: 2018 25th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), pp. 571–580 (2018)
P18	Tusjunt, M., Vatanawood, W.: Refactoring Orchestrated Web Services into Microservices Using Decomposition Pattern. In: 2018 IEEE 4th International Conference on Computer and Communications (ICCC), pp. 609–613 (2018)
P17	Sriraman, A., Wenisch, T.F.: $\mu$ Suite: A Benchmark Suite for Microservices. In: 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC), pp. 1–12 (2018)
P16	Amiri, M.J.: Object-Aware Identification of Microservices. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC), pp. 253–256 (2018)
P15	Baresi, L., Garriga, M., Renzis, A. de: Microservices Identification Through Interface Analysis. In: Paoli, F. de, Schulte, S., Broch Johnsen, E. (eds.) Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing. European Conference, ESOCC 2017, Oslo, Norway, September 27–29, 2017 (2017)
P14	Gouigoux, J.; Tamzalit, D.: From Monolith to Microservices: Lessons Learned on an Industrial Migration to a Web Oriented Architecture. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ICSAW), pp. 62–65 (2017)
P13	Boubendir, A., Bertin, E., Simoni, N.: A VNF-as-a-service design through micro-services disassembling the IMS. In: 2017 20th Conference on Innovations in Clouds, Internet and Networks (ICIN), pp. 203–210 (2017)
P12	Fan, C., Ma, S.: Migrating Monolithic Mobile Application to Microservice Architecture: An Experiment Report. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on AI Mobile Services (AIMS), pp. 109–112 (2017)
P11	Hausotter, A., Koschel, A., Zuch, M., Busch, J., Kreczik, A.: Process and Service Modelling of Insurancy Use Cases. In: 2017 IEEE 10th Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA), pp. 116–124 (2017)
P10	Klock, S., van der Werf, J.M.E.M., Guelen, J.P., Jansen, S.: Workload-Based Clustering of Coherent Feature Sets in Microservice Architectures. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA), pp. 11–20 (2017)
P9	Chen, R., Li, S., Li, Z.: From Monolith to Microservices: A Dataflow-Driven Approach. In: 2017 24th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), pp. 466–475 (2017)
P8	Mazlami, G., Cito, J., Leitner, P.: Extraction of Microservices from Monolithic Software Architectures. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), pp. 524–531 (2017)
P7	Sarita, Sebastian, S.: Transform Monolith into Microservices using Docker. In: 2017 International Conference on Computing, Communication, Control and Automation (ICCUBEA), pp. 1–5 (2017)
P6	Sayara, A., Towhid, M.S., Hossain, M.S.: A probabilistic approach for obtaining an optimized number of services using weighted matrix and multidimensional scaling. In: 2017 20th International Conference of Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT), pp. 1–6 (2017)
P5	Hasselbring, W., Steinacker, G.: Microservice Architectures for Scalability, Agility and Reliability in E-Commerce. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Workshops (ICSAW), pp. 243–246 (2017)
P4	Asik, T., Selcuk, Y.E.: Policy enforcement upon software based on microservice architecture. In: 2017 IEEE 15th International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications (SERA), pp. 283–287 (2017)
P3	Gysel, M., Kölbener, L., Giersche, W., Zimmermann, O.: Service Cutter: A Systematic Approach to Service Decomposition. In: Aiello, M., Johnsen, E.B., Dustdar, S., Georgievski, I. (eds.) Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing. 5th IFIP WG 2.14 European Conference, ESOCC 2016, Vienna, Austria, September 5-7, 2016, Proceedings, pp. 185–200 (2016)
P2	Ahmadvand, M., Ibrahim, A.: Requirements Reconciliation for Scalable and Secure Microservice (De)composition. In: 2016 IEEE 24th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW), pp. 68–73 (2016)
P1	Levcovitz, A., Terra, R., Valente, M.T.: Towards a Technique for Extracting Microservices from Monolithic Enterprise Systems. 3rd Brazilian Workshop on Software Visualization, Evolution and Maintenance (VEM), 97–104 (2015)