Processes, Motivations, and Issues for Migrating to Microservices Architectures: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Microservices have been getting more and more popular in recent years, and several companies are migrating monolithic applications to microservices. Microservices allow developers to independently develop and deploy services, and ease the adoption of agile processes. However, many companies are still hesitant to migrate because they consider microservice as a hype or because they are not aware of the migration process and the benefits and issues related to migration. For this purpose, we conducted a survey among experienced practitioners who already migrated their monoliths to microservices. In this paper, we identify a process framework based on the comparison of three different migration processes adopted by the interviewed practitioners, together with the common motivations and issues that commonly take place during migrations. In this work, we describe the results and provide an analysis of our survey, which includes a comparison of the migration processes, a ranking of motivations, and issues and some insights into the benefits achieved after the adoption. Maintainability and scalability were consistently ranked as the most important motivations, along with a few other technical and nontechnical motivations. Although return on investment was expected to take longer, the reduced maintenance effort in the long run was considered to highly compensate for this.