A Process Model for Microservices Design and Identification

Microservices have been established as an architectural style for developing modern applications. A major challenge in theory and praxis is to identify a adequate granularity of microservices. In order to achieve a consistent and easily understandable process, this paper presents a process model for the design and identification of microservices. This process model should support the development of microservices and the selection of suitable identification approaches. The process model is deductively derived on the basis of existing identification approaches from literature. This serves to classify the approaches into the phases of the presented process model but also to identify research gaps and thus new approaches. The process model is evaluated first by integrating existing identification approaches into the model. Second, a case study shows that the process model allows for multiple perspectives on microservice architecture and can lead to different architecture alternatives. As a result, microservice architecture decisions can be better justified, compared and derived by software architects in a standardized way. We also show that the process model can be integrated into existing software development processes.