Object-Aware Identification of Microservices

Microservices is an architectural style inspired by service-oriented computing that structures an application as a collection of cohesive and loosely coupled components, which implement business capabilities. One of today's problems in designing microservice architectures is to decompose a system into cohesive, loosely coupled, and fine-grained microservices. Identification of microservices is usually performed intuitively, based on the experience of the system designers, however, if the functionalities of a system are highly interconnected, it is a challenging task to decompose the system into appropriate microservices. To tackle this challenge, we present a microservice identification method that decomposes a system using clustering technique. To this end, we model a system as a set of business processes and take two aspects of structural dependency and data object dependency of functionalities into account. Furthermore, we conduct a study to evaluate the effect of process characteristics on the accuracy of identification approaches.