A Decomposition and Metric-Based Evaluation Framework for Microservices
This work addresses the problem of architectural migration and evaluation for companies transitioning to microservices, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing decomposition and measurement approaches.
The paper tackles the complexity of migrating from monolithic systems to microservices by proposing a decomposition system based on business process mining and a metric-based evaluation framework to objectively assess microservice quality, with results showing it helps companies identify decomposition options and reduce decision subjectivity.
Migrating from monolithic systems into microservice is a very complex task. Companies are commonly decomposing the monolithic system manually, analyzing dependencies of the monolith and then assessing different decomposition options. The goal of our work is two-folded: 1) we provide a microservice measurement framework to objectively evaluate and compare the quality of microservices-based systems; 2) we propose a decomposition system based on business process mining. The microservice measurement framework can be applied independently from the decomposition process adopted, but is also useful to continuously evaluate the architectural evolution of a system. Results show that the decomposition framework helps companies to easily identify the different decomposition options. The measurement framework can help to decrease the subjectivity of the decision between different decomposition options and to evaluate architectural erosion in existing systems.