Process of Conversion Monolithic Application to Microservices Based Architecture

Abstract

Software architecture is the basic structure for software application development. Monolithic software architecture is used to develop software products in earlier decades. Microservices is recently introduced software architecture that promises of high maintainability and scalability. Most of the legacy applications are followed by the monolithic architecture pattern. Software complexity becomes unmanageable with the growth of the code base of the application. Monolithic architecture fails when the complexity of software increases. To overcome difficulties of the monolithic architecture, computer scientists try to move for bettersoftware architecture such as microservices architecture. The transformation of a real-world operational software application into a new architecture-based application is a challenge. Transformation of monolithic based application into the microservices-based application has been discovered in a theoretical manner. Identify theories and concepts related to the transformation of software architecture will be one concern of the thesis. Then based on analysis will evaluate the transformation approaches. Based on the evaluated studies, three processes will be introduced to convert, the monolithic real-world operation application into microservices. “Refactoring from scratch”, “incremental refactoring” and “convert only new components into microservices” are the three processors that will be described. Introduced conversion processors are in a conceptual manner which can directly apply to real-world application. Since the conversion processes are in a conceptual manner, it can optimize based on the situation and requirements. The research outcome evaluated by applying the conversion processes to the realworld application (Sri Lanka Telecom Work Force Management System). Evaluation of the processes based on the number of microservices generate, time to complete conversion and resources used for conversion. Outcome of the research is about three conversion process which convert monolithic based application to microservice application.