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Re-engineering Legacy Systems as Microservices: An Industrial Survey of Criteria to Deal with Modularity and Variability of Features

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Abstract

Microservices is an emerging industrial technique to promote better modularization and management of small and autonomous services. Microservice architecture is widely used to overcome the limitations of monolithic legacy systems, such as limited maintainability and reusability. The re-engineering of monolithic legacy systems into microservice-based architectures has been receiving great attention from industry and academia lately. However, there is little knowledge on how professionals perform microservice extraction to conduct the re-engineering process. In particular, there is not much information of how legacy features should be modularized and customized as microservices, while managing variability, to fulfill customer needs. In order to address this gap, we performed a study composed of two phases. Firstly, we conduct an online survey with 26 specialists that contributed to the migration of legacy systems to a microservice architecture. Secondly, we conduct individual interviews with seven participants of the survey. The results reveal that criteria related to modularity such as coupling, cohesion, and reuse are considered useful during the microservice extraction. Half of the participants dealt with systems with variability during the extraction. Moreover, they stated that variability is a key criterion for structuring the microservices.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html.

  2. 2.

    https://www.docker.com/.

  3. 3.

    https://kubernetes.io/.

  4. 4.

    https://scholar.google.com/.

  5. 5.

    https://swagger.io/docs/specification/about/.

  6. 6.

    https://avro.apache.org.

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Acknowledgements

This study was partially funded by CNPq grants 151723/2020-6, 434969/2018-4, 312149/2016-6, 408356/2018-9 and 428994/2018-0, 421306/2018-1, 309844/2018-5, CAPES grant 175956, the Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Supporting Research in the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) grants 22520-7/2016, 010002285/2019, and PDR-10 program 202073/2020, FAPPR grants 51152 and 51435, and FAPEAL grants 60030.0000000462/2020.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Luiz Carvalho

  2. Present Address: University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Luiz Carvalho

  3. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Alessandro Garcia & Carlos Lucena

  4. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Wesley K. G. Assunção

  5. Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Linz, Austria

    Wesley K. G. Assunção

  6. State University of Maringá, Maringá, Brazil

    Thelma Elita Colanzi

  7. University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

    Rodrigo Bonifácio

  8. IBM Research, São Paulo, Brazil

    Leonardo P. Tizzei & Renato Cerqueira

  9. Federal Center for Technological Education of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Rafael de Mello

  10. Federal University of Alagoas, Maceió, Brazil

    Márcio Ribeiro

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  1. Luiz Carvalho
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  2. Alessandro Garcia
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  3. Wesley K. G. Assunção
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  4. Thelma Elita Colanzi
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  5. Rodrigo Bonifácio
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  6. Leonardo P. Tizzei
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  7. Rafael de Mello
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  9. Márcio Ribeiro
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  10. Carlos Lucena
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Correspondence to Luiz Carvalho or Wesley K. G. Assunção .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. École de Technologie Supérieure, Universite du Québec, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Roberto E. Lopez-Herrejon

  2. Tecnalia, Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA), Derio, Spain

    Jabier Martinez

  3. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Linz, Austria

    Wesley Klewerton Guez Assunção

  4. Sorbonne Universités & CNRS-LIP6, Paris, Paris, France

    Tewfik Ziadi

  5. IRISA-Inria, Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) & University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France

    Mathieu Acher

  6. Departamento de Informática, Federal University of Parana (UFPR), Curitiba, Brazil

    Silvia Vergilio

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Carvalho, L. et al. (2023). Re-engineering Legacy Systems as Microservices: An Industrial Survey of Criteria to Deal with Modularity and Variability of Features. In: Lopez-Herrejon, R.E., Martinez, J., Guez Assunção, W.K., Ziadi, T., Acher, M., Vergilio, S. (eds) Handbook of Re-Engineering Software Intensive Systems into Software Product Lines. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11686-5_19

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