Towards Automated Microservices Extraction Using Muti-objective Evolutionary Search

Abstract

We introduce in this paper a novel approach, named MSExtractor, that formulate the microservices identification problem as a multi-objective combinatorial optimization problem to decompose a legacy application into a set of cohesive, loosely-coupled and coarse-grained services. We employ the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to drive a search process towards optimal microservices identification while considering structural dependencies in the source code. We conduct an empirical evaluation on a benchmark of two open-source legacy software systems to assess the efficiency of our approach. Results show that MSExtractor is able to find relevant microservice candidates and outperforms recent three state-of-the-art approaches.