An Approach to Evolving Legacy Enterprise System to Microservice-Based Architecture through Feature-Driven Evolution Rules

Evolving legacy enterprise systems into a lean system architecture has been on the agendas of many enterprises. Recent advance in legacy system evaluation is in favour of microservice technologies, which not only significantly reduce the complexity in deployment of enterprise systems but also enhance the availability of services to system users. However, there are technical challenges to overcome towards a successful transformation. Challenges, relating to information security, container optimisation, the performance of a new system and its deployment, are particularly under concern. Tocope with these technical challenges, a new approach is proposedin this paper to govern the evolution of legacy systems into amicroservice-based and cloud-hosted architecture. This approach includes a detailed working process, a set of transformation rules towards microservices and their repositories. In addition, a conceptual framework is drawn to provide a comprehensive illustration to this evolution approach. Moreover, a case study is presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed approach on the evaluation of a chosen legacy system, as well as the procedure of system architecture optimisation