Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

From a Monolith to a Microservices Architecture: An Approach Based on Transactional Contexts

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Software Architecture (ECSA 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11681))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Microservices have become the software architecture of choice for business applications. Initially originated at Netflix and Amazon, they result from the need to partition, both, software development teams and executing components, to, respectively, foster agile development and horizontal scalability. Currently, there is a large number of monolith applications that are being migrated to a microservices architecture. This article proposes the identification of business applications transactional contexts for the design of microservices. Therefore, the emphasis is to drive the aggregation of domain entities by the transactional contexts where they are executed, instead of by their domain structural inter-relationships. Additionally, we propose a complete workflow for the identification of microservices together with a set of tools that assist the developers on this process. The comparison of our approach with another software architecture tool and with an expert decomposition in two case studies revealed high precision values, which reflects that accurate service candidates are produced, while providing visualization perspectives facilitates the analysis of the impact of the decomposition on the application business logic.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 49.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/gousiosg/java-callgraph.

  2. 2.

    https://www.scipy.org/.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/socialsoftware/edition.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/socialsoftware/blended-workflow.

  5. 5.

    https://ldod.uc.pt.

  6. 6.

    https://structure101.com/.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/socialsoftware/mono2micro.

References

  1. 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, September 2016

    Google Scholar 

  2. Amiri, M.J.: Object-aware identification of microservices. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC), pp. 253–256, July 2018

    Google Scholar 

  3. Anquetil, N., Fourrier, C., Lethbridge, T.C.: Experiments with clustering as a software remodularization method. In: Proceedings of the Sixth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE 1999, p. 235, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ball, T.: The concept of dynamic analysis. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 24(6), 216–234 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Baresi, L., Garriga, M., De Renzis, A.: Microservices identification through interface analysis. In: De Paoli, F., Schulte, S., Broch Johnsen, E. (eds.) ESOCC 2017. LNCS, vol. 10465, pp. 19–33. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67262-5_2

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Brewer, E.A.: Towards robust distributed systems (abstract). In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2000, p. 7. ACM, New York (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Cachopo, J., Rito-Silva, A.: Combining software transactional memory with a domain modeling language to simplify web application development. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Engineering, ICWE 2006, pp. 297–304. ACM, New York (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Carrasco, A., van Bladel, B., Demeyer, S.: Migrating towards microservices: migration and architecture smells. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Refactoring, IWoR 2018, pp. 1–6. ACM, New York (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Escobar, D., et al.: Towards the understanding and evolution of monolithic applications as microservices. In: 2016 XLII Latin American Computing Conference (CLEI), pp. 1–11, October 2016

    Google Scholar 

  10. Evans, E.J.: Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity In the Heart of Software. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Di Francesco, P., Lago, P., Malavolta, I.: Migrating towards microservice architectures: an industrial survey. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA), p. 29-2909, April 2018

    Google Scholar 

  12. Fritzsch, J., Bogner, J., Zimmermann, A., Wagner, S.: From monolith to microservices: a classification of refactoring approaches. In: Bruel, J.-M., Mazzara, M., Meyer, B. (eds.) DEVOPS 2018. LNCS, vol. 11350, pp. 128–141. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06019-0_10

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. 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.) ESOCC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9846, pp. 185–200. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44482-6_12

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Hassan, S., Bahsoon, R.: Microservices and their design trade-offs: a self-adaptive roadmap. In: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC), pp. 813–818, June 2016

    Google Scholar 

  15. 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, July 2018

    Google Scholar 

  16. 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, April 2017

    Google Scholar 

  17. Maqbool, O., Babri, H.: Hierarchical clustering for software architecture recovery. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 33(11), 759–780 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. 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. IEEE (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Nakazawa, R., Ueda, T., Enoki, M., Horii, H.: Visualization tool for designing microservices with the monolith-first approach. In: 2018 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT), pp. 32–42, September 2018

    Google Scholar 

  20. Nielson, F., Nielson, H.R., Hankin, C.: Principles of Program Analysis. Springer, Heidelberg (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03811-6

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  21. Taibi, D., Lenarduzzi, V.: On the definition of microservice bad smells. IEEE Softw. 35(3), 56–62 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Thönes, J.: Microservices. IEEE Softw. 32(1), 116 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Tyszberowicz, S., Heinrich, R., Liu, B., Liu, Z.: Identifying microservices using functional decomposition. In: Feng, X., Müller-Olm, M., Yang, Z. (eds.) SETTA 2018. LNCS, vol. 10998, pp. 50–65. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99933-3_4

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) with reference UID/CEC/50021/2019.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. INESC-ID/Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001, Lisbon, Portugal

    Luís Nunes, Nuno Santos & António Rito Silva

Authors
  1. Luís Nunes
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Nuno Santos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. António Rito Silva
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to António Rito Silva .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Tomas Bures

  2. University of Lille, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

    Laurence Duchien

  3. University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

    Paola Inverardi

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Nunes, L., Santos, N., Rito Silva, A. (2019). From a Monolith to a Microservices Architecture: An Approach Based on Transactional Contexts. In: Bures, T., Duchien, L., Inverardi, P. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11681. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29983-5_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29983-5_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29982-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29983-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation