Migrating to Cloud-Native Architectures Using Microservices: An Experience Report

Abstract

Abstract. Migration to the cloud has been a popular topic in industry and academia in recent years. Despite many benefits that the cloud presents, such as high availability and scalability, most of the on-premise application architectures are not ready to fully exploit the benefits of this environment, and adapting them to this environment is a non-trivial task. Microservices have appeared recently as novel architectural styles that are native to the cloud. These cloud-native architectures can facilitate migrating on-premise architectures to fully benefit from the cloud environments because non-functional attributes, like scalability, are inherent in this style. The existing approaches on cloud migration does not mostly consider cloud-native architectures as their first-class citizens. As a result, the final product may not meet its primary drivers for migration. In this paper, we intend to report our experience and lessons learned in an ongoing project on migrating a monolithic on-premise software architecture to microservices. We concluded that microservices is not a one-fit-all solution as it introduces new complexities to the system, and many factors, such as distribution complexities, should be considered before adopting this style. However, if adopted in a context that needs high flexibility in terms of scalability and availability, it can deliver its promised benefits.

Microservices Architecture Enables DevOps: Migration to a Cloud-Native Architecture

“…To this end, using our previous experience in defining migration patterns [17], we documented our experience in this project and similar practices in the state-of-the-art of microservices (see [4,3], http://microservices. io/) as method chunks.…”

“…Migrating monolithic architectures to microservices brings in many benefits including, but not limited to flexibility to adapt to the technological changes in order to avoid technology lock-in, and more importantly, reduced time-to-market, and better development team structuring around services [3].…”

An empirical study on principles and practices of continuous delivery and deployment

“…This could come, for instance, in form of a catalogue of architectural patterns which supports various CD practices. Microservices [3,30] are a promising starting point, but the community is currently lacking formal research into the tradeoffs associated with the microservices architectural style, its suitability for various CD practices, and how to decompose an application into microservices in the first place.…”

“…Participants. We distributed the survey within our personal networks, social media, via two DevOps related newsletters 3,4 , and via a German-speaking IT news portal 5 . As monetary incentives have been found to have a positive effect on participation rates [32], we offered the option to enter a raffle for two Amazon 50$ gift vouchers on survey completion.…”

Pattern‐based multi‐cloud architecture migration

“…However, we have analyzed and considered other migration projects, for example, different IaaS/PaaS/SaaS migration processes . These include completed or ongoing migrations of an e‐commerce application with high availability and performance needs, a document processing system that needs a multi‐cloud integration with ERP system components, a financial services application with a hybrid on‐premise/cloud architecture and the need for integrated security management, components of an ERP system with the need for mobile access, sensor‐based IoT‐cloud integration solutions where sensor data is stored and analyzed in the cloud. an more recently a commercial Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) platform . …”