Migration of Monolithic Applications Towards Microservices Under the Vision of the Information Hiding Principle: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Organizations throughout time accumulate applications, which, given their old age, are generally designed in monolithic architecture. Given technological advances, enterprise has the necessity to modernize these applications, being the migration from a monolithic architecture towards microservice architecture a good alternative, however according to our research many failed attempts were found. We performed a Systematic Mapping Study in order to obtain studies to show how to migrate or modernize monolithic applications towards microservices based on some principle of Software Engineering. As a result, we found that there are different types of approaches of studies, such as: (a) solution proposals, (b) experience reports, (c) validations research and (d) opinion articles. Between the studies found, there are no studies related to migration process that is based on a Software Engineering principle, nor the Information Hiding Principle. This research indicates that there is a lack of a theoretical foundation with guidelines on how to perform a decomposition of a monolithic application towards microservices. Given this gap, we propose to migrate a monolithic application to microservices following the principles of the Information Hiding Principle.