Migration of software components to microservices: Matching and synthesis

Abstract

Nowadays more and more software companies, as well as individual software developers, adopt the microservice architecture for their software solutions. Although many software systems are being designed and developed from scratch, a significant number of existing monolithic solutions tend to be transformed to this new architectural style. What is less common, though, is how to migrate component-based software systems to systems composed of microservices and enjoy the benefits of ease of changes, rapid deployment and versatile architecture. This paper proposes a novel and integrated process for the decomposition of existing software components with the aim being to fully or partially replace their functional parts with by a number of suitable and available microservices. The proposed process is built on semi-formal profiling and utilizes ontologies to match between properties of the decomposed functions of the component and those offered by microservices residing in a repository. Matching concludes with recommended solutions yielded by multi-objective optimization which considers also possible dependencies between the functional parts.