Microservices Migration in Industry: Intentions, Strategies, and Challenges

Abstract

To remain competitive in a fast changing environment, many companies started to migrate their legacy applications towards a Microservices architecture. Such extensive migration processes require careful planning and consideration of implications and challenges likewise. In this regard, handson experiences from industry practice are still rare. To fill this gap in scientific literature, we contribute a qualitative study on intentions, strategies, and challenges in the context of migrations to Microservices. We investigated the migration process of 14 systems across different domains and sizes by conducting 16 indepth interviews with software professionals from 10 companies. We present a separate description of each case and summarize the most important findings. As primary migration drivers, maintainability and scalability were identified. Due to the high complexity of their legacy systems, most companies preferred a rewrite using current technologies over splitting up existing code bases. This was often caused by the absence of a suitable decomposition approach. As such, finding the right service cut was a major technical challenge, next to building the necessary expertise with new technologies. Organizational challenges were especially related to large, traditional companies that simultaneously established agile processes. Initiating a mindset change and ensuring smooth collaboration between teams were crucial for them. Future research on the evolution of software systems will in particular profit from the individual cases presented.

Identification of microservices from monolithic applications through topic modelling

“…The migration itself is a complex process, very dependant on the domain of the software project which might require multiple iterations until completion [10]. In the work done by Balalaie et al [3] and Fritzsch et al [13] with the goal of systematising the process by identifying patterns, strategies and challenges, both reported the decomposition of software systems as being one of the main struggles. In Fritzsch et al [13] research, none of the participants was aware of automated systems that could assist the migration to MA.…”

Modernização de Arquiteturas de Sistemas para suporte à Transformação Digital

“…Os microsserviços são uma peça fundamental de um modelo arquitetural que visa gerar flexibilização de ambientes. Eles possibilitem a convivência com sistemas monolíticos (antigos) [Fritzsch et al 2019, Computing 2017]. Essa arquitetura de convivência pode habilitar negócios a estarem aderentes aos anseios da transformação digital [Choudhary et al 2019].…”

“…Para tal, temos o modelo de cloud computing que permite a criação de aplicativos modernos por meio do provisionamento de hardware sob demanda de forma rápida [Viggiato et al 2018] [Gkikopoulos 2019, Dragičević and Bošnjak 2019. Essa necessidade que a transformação digital traz para as empresas, se transformam em novos desafios para a engenharia de software [Fritzsch et al 2019].…”

Industry practices and challenges for the evolvability assurance of microservices

“…The interview results related to the evolvability assurance of microservices have already been discussed on their own in (Bogner et al 2019a). Since the extensive interviews also covered additional topics, there are also publications on used technologies, the adherence to microservice characteristics, and overall software quality (Bogner et al 2019b) as well as on intentions, strategies, and challenges for migrating to microservices (Fritzsch et al 2019a). This article therefore extends our previous work (Bogner et al 2019a) with a grey literature review and the joint interpretation of interview and GLR results.…”