Improving microservices extraction using evolutionary search

Sellami, Khaled; Ouni, Ali; Saied, Mohamed Aymen; Bouktif, Salah; Mkaouer, Mohamed Wiem

doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106996

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Sellami et al [31] present MSExtractor, an approach to decompose monoliths written in an object-oriented (OO) programming language in microservices. The application is conceived as a set of classes that are automatically classified as either inner, if they are only used as internal components, or interfaces, if they expose public endpoints to the users.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cromlech: Semi-Automated Monolith Decomposition Into Microservices

Quattrocchi,

Cocco,

Staffa

et al. 2024

IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput.

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Microservices architectures conceive an application as a composition of loosely-coupled sub-systems that are developed, deployed, maintained, updated, and scaled independently. Compared to monoliths, microservices speed up evolution and increase flexibility. For these reasons they are becoming the reference architecture for many practitioners. A key challenge to embrace a microservices architecture is how to decompose an application into microservices: a choice that deeply affects all subsequent development phases in ways that are difficult to foresee and evaluate. Without any tool to support their reasoning, developers may erroneously evaluate the various alternatives, leading to inaccurate decomposition choices that would result in increased development, operations, and maintenance costs. This paper tackles the problem with Cromlech, a semi-automatic tool to decompose a software system into microservices. Cromlech (i) takes in input a high-level model of the system in terms of functionalities and data entities accessed by those functionalities, (ii) formulates decomposition as an optimization problem, and (iii) outputs a proposed placement of functionalities and data onto microservices, using a visual representation that helps reasoning on the resulting architecture. Cromlech evaluates design concerns, communication overheads, data management requirements, opportunities and costs of data replication. Our evaluation on a real-world industrial application shows that Cromlech consistently delivers more efficient solutions than simple heuristics and state-of-the-art approaches, and provides useful insights to developers.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cromlech: Semi-Automated Monolith Decomposition Into Microservices

Quattrocchi,

Cocco,

Staffa

et al. 2024

IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput.

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show abstract

“…In this paper, we distinguish these two types of elements mainly for better capturing the associations across microservices. In particular, we employ the concept of interface classes and inner classes (Sellami et al, 2022) to distinguish between the two aforementioned classes, respectively. In the meantime, we use the concept of entity to embody both of these classes within a microservice.…”

Section: Basic Definitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, few coupling measurement in the SE literature has been proposed for describing the degree to which the microservices in a software system are related. Instead, some coupling metrics that were proposed for object-oriented or serviceoriented paradigms have been adapted and applied now in MSA, such as Sellami et al (2022), Carvalho et al (2020), Mazlami et al (2017) and Li et al (2019). Most of these metrics are generally based on simple counts of coupling ''evidence'' in a system, such as the number of dependencies (e.g., static calls) between microservices and the number of software elements (e.g., classes) involved in the dependencies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On measuring coupling between microservices

Zhong

Zhang

et al. 2023

Journal of Systems and Software

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Towards a security‐optimized approach for the microservice‐oriented decomposition

Liu,

Chen,

Qian

et al. 2024

J Software Evolu Process

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Microservice architecture (MSA) is a mainstream architectural style due to its high maintainability and scalability. In practice, an appropriate microservice‐oriented decomposition is the foundation to make a system enjoy the benefits of MSA. In terms of decomposing monolithic systems into microservices, researchers have been exploring many optimization objectives, of which modularity is a predominantly focused quality attribute. Security is also a critical quality attribute, that measures the extent to which a system protects data from malicious access or use by attackers. Considering security in microservices‐oriented decomposition can help avoid the risk of leaking critical data and other unexpected software security issues. However, few researchers consider the security objective during microservice‐oriented decomposition, because the measurement of security and the trade‐off with other objectives are challenging in reality. To bridge this research gap, we propose a security‐optimized approach for microservice‐oriented decomposition (So4MoD). In this approach, we adapt five metrics from previous studies for the measurement of the data security of candidate microservices. A multi‐objective optimization algorithm based on NSGA‐II is designed to search for microservices with optimized security and modularity. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed So4MoD, we perform several experiments on eight open‐source projects and compare the decomposition results to other three state‐of‐the‐art approaches, that is, FoSCI, CO‐GCN, and MSExtractor. The experiment results show that our approach can achieve at least an 11.5% improvement in terms of security metrics. Moreover, the decomposition results of So4MoD outperform other approaches in four modularity metrics, demonstrating that So4MoD can optimize data security while pursuing a well‐modularized MSA.

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Improving microservices extraction using evolutionary search

Cited by 14 publications

References 39 publications

Cromlech: Semi-Automated Monolith Decomposition Into Microservices

Cromlech: Semi-Automated Monolith Decomposition Into Microservices

On measuring coupling between microservices

Towards a security‐optimized approach for the microservice‐oriented decomposition

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