Towards a Process for Migrating Legacy Systems into Microservice Architectural Style

Abstract

Microservice architectural style is a paradigm to develop systems as a suite of small and autonomous services, communicating thought a lightweight protocol. Currently, the most common way of adopting microservice architectures is by the modernization of legacy monolith systems. The migration of a legacy system into a microservice architecture is not a trivial task. In addition, there is a lack of recommendation or guidelines on how to perform such process. In view of this, this paper presents a preliminary process for conducting the migration of legacy systems into microservice architectures. This process was defined by analyzing and discussing pieces of work on the topic. As result, we propose a process composed of eight steps, grouped in four phases, which we describe together with their common input and output.

Towards an Architecture-centric Methodology for Migrating to Microservices

“…Wolfart et al approach the migration topic more holistically in their workin-progress paper [17]. They analyzed six primary studies to come up with a unified process.…”

“…Figure 2 shows our proposed architecture-centric framework for migrating to microservices. It incorporates ideas and groundwork of existing research, especially the works by Wolfart et al [17,16]. Aspects of the works by Taibi et al [14] and Bozan et al [5] have influenced the design as well.…”

“…Phase 1 starts with a set of activities aiming to comprehend the existing system and assess alternatives as described by Wolfart et al [17,16]. We depicted the common activities and involved personas.…”

A Qualitative Study of Legacy Systems Modernisation for Citizen-Centric Digital Government

“…Previous scholars have established several models and methods to help in the implementation of legacy systems modernisation [27][28][29]. However, the aspects involved were studied separately and were not comprehensive.…”

“…However, the aspects involved were studied separately and were not comprehensive. Most of the studies suggested strategies and methods as well as implementation processes from a technical perspective [29,30]. They were also not specialised in the public sector and do not emphasise the importance of a citizen-centric digital government transition.…”