From a Monolith to a Microservices Architecture: An Approach Based on Transactional Contexts

Microservices have become the software architecture of choice for business applications. Initially originated at Netflix and Amazon, they result from the need to partition, both, software development teams and executing components, to, respectively, foster agile development and horizontal scalability. Currently, there is a large number of monolith applications that are being migrated to a microservices architecture. This article proposes the identification of business applications transactional contexts for the design of microservices. Therefore, the emphasis is to drive the aggregation of domain entities by the transactional contexts where they are executed, instead of by their domain structural inter-relationships. Additionally, we propose a complete workflow for the identification of microservices together with a set of tools that assist the developers on this process. The comparison of our approach with another software architecture tool and with an expert decomposition in two case studies revealed high precision values, which reflects that accurate service candidates are produced, while providing visualization perspectives facilitates the analysis of the impact of the decomposition on the application business logic.