Visually-Assisted Decomposition of Monoliths to Microservices

Abstract

In the world of software development, the concept of microservices is popular. This architectural style has received much attention in both business and academia, and converting a monolithic application into a microservice-based application has become a regular practice. Companies struggle with migrating their existing monolithic applications to microservices, and software architects and developers frequently face challenges due to a lack of complete awareness of alternative migration methodologies, making the migration process even harder.This dissertation aims to structurally analyse the state of the art in migrating monolithic applications to microservices architectural style, mainly which tools help architects, engineers, and developers and how automated they are. A systematic literature review identified one hundred and six relevant publications. These publications were organised and grouped to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the current tools available for microservice migration.Furthermore, we present an extensible framework to help architects, engineers, and developers during the migration process by addressing gaps in understanding various migration tools and approaches, allowing for easy comparison between multiple options. The application combines multiple tools into one platform, allowing a comprehensive visualisation of migration proposals and making it easy to compare different options.To evaluate the efficacy of the application, we conducted an empirical study that focused on assessing its usability and the associated workload experienced by users during its utilisation. The study yielded favourable outcomes concerning usability, indicating that participants found the application user-friendly and intuitive. However, the workload results were diverse, implying that the application's efficacy in mitigating overall workload during the decomposition process was not universally experienced among the participants.