A Quality Driven Framework for Decomposing Legacy Monolith Applications to Microservice Architecture

Abstract

Transforming monolith applications to microservice architecture is a common cloud migration strategy for businesses to accomplish cloud-native benefits. However, decomposing monolith applications is a challenging task that requires experience, skills, and dedication to initiate this process, and often, the migrated product quality is neglected. The lack of relevant guidelines on the design quality for distributed cloud environment architecture such as microservice further exacerbates this concern. We propose a quality-driven decomposition framework for migrating monolith applications to the cloud-native architecture. Our approach implies six activities in decomposing monolith applications from the source code to the microservice architecture. This framework supports various architectural design properties related to maintainability quality. Furthermore, this framework enhances the machine learning approach to enable automatic microservice identification, hence evaluating the design quality using a scoring-based approach. We use five applications to evaluate our approach, and the results show that our framework can provide insightful judgment to the designer regarding microservice design quality.