Microservices Boundary Determination Migration in DevOps: A Case Study

Abstract

The microservice architecture (MSA) is a widely used and researched approach in industry and academia. However, designing the migration to MSA is a complex and challenging task, and there is a lack of clear guidelines on how to address both business and technical issues during the process. This paper presents a step-by-step method for determining the boundaries of microservices, which is a critical activity in MSA migration for both practitioners and academics.We conducted a case study of SHAMIM, a nationwide project serving over 120,000 students, to demonstrate the proposed method. The microservice boundaries were determined by utilizing both business and technical input types, including domain-driven design (DDD), business processes, service call numbers, and data access patterns in databases.Our findings suggest that MSA migration can be conducted more reliably by using change documents maintained by the DevOps team. The proposed method leads to clear improvements in the determination of each microservice boundary, and it can be useful for practitioners and academics involved in MSA migration.

Keywords

• microservice architecture
• microservices migration
• monolith
• microservice boundaries boundaries
• determination
• devops