Microservice Decomposition Techniques: An Independent Tool Comparison

The microservice-based architecture – a SOA-inspired principle of dividing systems into components that communicate with each other using language-agnostic APIs – has gained increased popularity in industry. Yet, migrating a monolithic application into microservices is a challenging task. A number of automated microservice decomposition techniques have been proposed in industry and academia to help developers with the migration complexity.

Each of the techniques is usually evaluated on its own set of case study applications and evaluation criteria, making it difficult to in this field. To fill this gap, this paper performs an independent study comparing six microservice decomposition tools that implement a wide range of different decomposition principles with each other on a set of four carefully selected benchmark applications. The results of our analysis highlight strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches and propose suggestions for future research.

Publication

Yingying Wang, Sarah Bornais, and Julia Rubin. "Microservice Decomposition Techniques: An Independent Tool Comparison" In Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'24), 2024. [pdf, bibtex]