Microservice Architecture Reconstruction and Visualization Techniques: A Review

Abstract

Microservice system solutions are now mainstream. The older microservices-based systems are not more than 15 years old, and their architecture is by far different than the one originally designed because of several changes applied to the systems due to the implementation of new features and bug fixing. The evolution of these legacy systems is therefore subjected to degradation. One of the most important methods to identify degradation is being able to reconstruct the software architecture of a system based on the current system running in production. Different methods have been proposed in the past: methods based on the static analysis of the source code of the microservices and methods based on the analysis of the log traces collected at runtime. Both static and dynamic analysisbased methods have their pros ad cons. In this work, we review the existing technologies for static and dynamic architectural reconstruction and related tools adopted to visualize the reconstructed architecture. The result of this work can be useful both to practitioners and researchers that can further develop these methods to provide better support for architectural degradation.