Decomposing Monolithic to Microservices: Keyword Extraction and BFS Combination Method to Cluster Monolithic’s Classes

Abstract

Abstract Microservices architecture is widely used because of the ease of maintaining its microservices, as opposed to encapsulating functionality in a monolithic, which may negatively impact the development process when the application continues to grow. The migration process from a monolithic architecture to microservices became necessary, but it often relies on the architect's intuition only, which may cost many resources. A method to assist developers in decomposing monolithic into microservices is proposed to address that problem. Unlike the existing methods that often rely on non-source code artifacts which may lead into inaccurate decomposition if the artifacts do not reflect the latest condition of the monolith, the proposed method relies on analyzing the application source code to produce a grouping recommendation for building microservices. By using specific keyword extraction followed by Breadth First Search traversal with certain rules, the proposed method decomposed the monolith's component into several cluster whose majority of cluster’s members have uniform business domain. Based on the experiment, the proposed method got an 0.81 accuracy mean in grouping monolithic's components with similar business domain, higher than the existing decomposition method's score. Further research is recommended to be done to increase the availability of the proposed method.

Keywords

• automatic software decomposition
• microservices
• monolithic architecture
• source code
• clustering