Architecting Microservices
Paolo Di Francesco · 2017
Inspired by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and from the convergence of Cloud Computing and Web 2.0, Microservice Architecture (MSA) has recently emerged as an architectural style particularly suitable to the cloud infrastructures. The MSA style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms. Although the set of MSA principles aim for high degree of flexibility, modularity and evolution, adopting, operating and maintaining microservice architectures in practice is challenging and time consuming. This paper reports on a PhD research project addressing three different challenges concerning MSA: (i) the identification of the key properties of microservice architectures, (ii) the identification and investigation on a description language for designing and analyzing architectures, (iii) the identification of the factors that impact the process of migrating existing applications towards MSA. The initial contributions of this project are: (i) a systematic mapping study on architecting microservices performed in order to understand the state of the research and the possible gaps in the area, (ii) an approach for architecture recovery of microservice-based systems named MicroART, and (iii) the implementation of the MicroART first prototype.