Title
Microservices Migration in Industry: Intentions, Strategies, and Challenges
Abstract
To remain competitive in a fast changing environment, many companies started to migrate their legacy applications towards a Microservices architecture. Such extensive migration processes require careful planning and consideration of implications and challenges likewise. In this regard, hands-on experiences from industry practice are still rare. To fill this gap in scientific literature, we contribute a qualitative study on intentions, strategies, and challenges in the context of migrations to Microservices. We investigated the migration process of 14 systems across different domains and sizes by conducting 16 in-depth interviews with software professionals from 10 companies. Along with a summary of the most important findings, we present a separate discussion of each case. As primary migration drivers, maintainability and scalability were identified. Due to the high complexity of their legacy systems, most companies preferred a rewrite using current technologies over splitting up existing code bases. This was often caused by the absence of a suitable decomposition approach. As such, finding the right service cut was a major technical challenge, next to building the necessary expertise with new technologies. Organizational challenges were especially related to large, traditional companies that simultaneously established agile processes. Initiating a mindset change and ensuring smooth collaboration between teams were crucial for them. Future research on the evolution of software systems can in particular profit from the individual cases presented.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/ICSME.2019.00081
2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
Keywords
Field
DocType
microservices, migration, interviews, empirical study, refactoring, decomposition, agile transformation, industry
Scientific literature,Mindset,Systems engineering,Computer science,Agile software development,Software system,Emerging technologies,Microservices,Maintainability,Legacy system,Process management
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
abs/1906.04702
1063-6773
978-1-7281-3095-8
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.43
15
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jonas Fritzsch181.56
Justus Bogner2205.57
Stefan Wagner374855.74
Alfred Zimmermann42612.90