A Novel Method for Identifying Microservices by Considering Quality Expectations and Deployment Constraints

作     者：Li, Jianan Xu, Hanchuan Xu, Xiaofei Wang, Zhongjie 

作者机构：Harbin Inst Technol Fac Comp Harbin Heilongjiang Peoples R China 

出 版 物：《INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING》 (国际软件工程与知识工程杂志)

年 卷 期：2022年第32卷第3期

页      面：417-437页

核心收录：

学科分类：0808[工学-电气工程] 08[工学] 0835[工学-软件工程] 0812[工学-计算机科学与技术（可授工学、理学学位）] 

基　　金：National Key Research and Development Program of China [2018YFB1402500] National Natural Science Foundation of China [61832014, 61832004] 

主　　题：Microservice identification coupling criteria quality expectations deployment constraints clustering 

摘      要：Nowadays, microservice architecture has become a dominant software development and deployment paradigm. Decomposing a system into loosely coupled, highly cohesive, and fine-grained microservices while meeting various technical constraints and implementing business capabilities is particularly important for microservice system (MS) designers. When an MS has a large number of functionalities and complex interconnections, it is a big challenge to identify microservices solely based on the experience of MS designers. We propose a structured and automated microservice identification method to decompose a system into appropriate microservices for this challenge. We model a system as unified modeling language (UML) class and sequence diagrams. In the identification phase, we take into account not only the traditional coupling-related criteria but also the quality expectation and deployment constraints, both of which have not yet been fully concerned in previous studies. Based on the criteria, a microservice identification algorithm using the clustering technique is designed. A case study of elderly care services illustrates the identification process. Experiments are conducted to evaluate and compare the proposed method against state-of-the-art methods. Results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms those compared from the literature.