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CLAIM: a Lightweight Approach to Identify Microservices in Dockerized Environments

Published: 18 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Background: Over the past decade, microservices have surged in popularity within software engineering. From a research viewpoint, mining studies are frequently employed to assess the evolution of diverse microservice properties. Despite the growing need, a validated static method to swiftly identify microservices seems to be currently missing in the literature.
Aims: We present Claim, a lightweight static approach that analyzes configuration files to identify microservices in Dockerized environments, specifically designed with mining studies in mind.
Method: To validate Claim, we conduct an empirical experiment comprising 20 repositories, 160 microservices, and 13k commits. A priori and manually defined ground truths are used to evaluate Claim’s microservice identification effectiveness and efficiency.
Results: Claim detects microservices with an accuracy of 82.0%, reports a median execution time of 61ms per commit, and requires in the worst case scenario 125.5s to analyze the history of a repository comprising 1509 commits. With respect to its closest competitor, CLAIM shines most in terms of false positive reduction (-40%).
Conclusions: While not able to reconstruct a microservice architecture in its entirety, Claim is an effective and efficient option to swiftly identify microservices in Dockerized environments, and seems especially fitted for software evolution mining studies.

References

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      EASE '24: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
      June 2024
      728 pages
      ISBN:9798400717017
      DOI:10.1145/3661167
      This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

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      Published: 18 June 2024

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      Author Tags

      1. Docker
      2. Microservices
      3. Repository Mining
      4. Static Analysis

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