Discovering Microservices in Enterprise Systems Using a Business Object Containment Heuristic

Abstract

The growing impact of IoT and Blockchain platforms on business applications has increased interest in leveraging large enterprise systems as Cloud-enabled microservices. However, large and monolithic enterprise systems are unsuitable for flexible integration with such platforms. This paper presents a technique to support the re-engineering of an enterprise system based on the fundamental mechanisms for structuring its architecture, i.e., business objects managed by software functions and their relationships which influence business object interactions via the functions. The technique relies on a heuristic for deriving business object exclusive containment relationships based on analysis of source code and system logs. Furthermore, the paper provides an analysis of distributing enterprise systems based on the business object containment relationships using the NSGA II software clustering and optimization technique. The heuristics and the software clustering and optimization techniques have been validated against two open-source enterprise systems: SugarCRM and ChurchCRM. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can identify microservice designs which support multiple desired microservice characteristics, such as high cohesion, low coupling, high scalability, high availability, and processing efficiency.