Migrating Monolithic Web Applications to Microservice Architectures Considering Dependencies on Databases and Views
Si-Hyun Kim, Jaewon Oh · 2025
This paper deals with the problem of reengineering a legacy monolithic Java web application (app) into a microservice architecture. For this migration, it is necessary to identify the essential components constituting the architecture of a monolithic web app and the relationships between these components. The functionally related components then need to be collected and grouped into multiple clusters, which are implemented as microservices. The legacy web app considered in this paper interacts with users through views (e.g., JSPs). Databases are typically accessed to handle user requests. An accurate understanding of the functionality of a legacy web app requires an analysis of how databases and views collaborate with other components within the app. In existing studies, databases and views are rarely considered essential components for this migration. However, when analyzing and representing a web app as a graph, this paper considers the substantial components of the app, including its database tables, views, and their relationships. We then propose a two-step embedding and clustering to identify the microservices based on an analysis of this graph. Compared to existing methods, the microservice apps identified by our approach from open-source web apps produce better accuracy and F1-score.