By Paolo Di Francesco
A MicroService Architecture (MSA) is a style inspired by service-oriented computing, with small services, running in their own process, and having a lightweight communication protocol. The problem at hand is legacy: systems that grew and became complex, and thus difficult to maintain. What if these systems are migrated to an MSA. They performed a suvey to characterize the activities and the challenges face by industrial practioners when migrating towards MSA. They performed 5 interviews, and 13 questionaires (18). The migration process was framed in the Horseshoe Model (Kazman et al). Typically, the migration process is organized in small increments. From the survey, they found that many follow a phased adoption, where new functionality is added as a MS, during the migration. Typically, they kept the data in the same structure (11/18), i.e., data was not migrated. This may hinder scalability and isolation. Many see challenges such as high coupling (9/18), boundary identification (7/18) and system decomposition (6/18). Some action points include to report more success stories, and to check the business-it alignment. Also, practioners should monitor the development effort and migrate when it grows too much.
