RADF: Architecture decomposition for function as a service

Abstract

As the most successful realization of serverless, function as a service (FaaS) brings in a novel cloud computing paradigm that can save operating costs, reduce management effort, enable seamless scalability, and augment development productivity. Migration of an existing application to the serverless architecture is, however, an intricate task as a great number of decisions need to be made along the way. We propose in this paper RADF, a semi-automatic approach that decomposes a monolith into serverless functions by analyzing the business logic inherent in the interface of the application. The proposed approach adopts a two-stage refactoring strategy, where a coarse-grained decomposition is performed at first, followed by a fine-grained one. As such, the decomposition process is simplified into smaller steps and adaptable to generate a solution at either microservice or function level. We have implemented RADF in a holistic DevOps methodology and evaluated its capability for microservice identification and feasibility for code refactoring. In the evaluation experiments, RADF achieves lower coupling and relatively balanced cohesion, compared to previous decomposition approaches.