Towards a Methodology to Form Microservices from Monolithic Ones

Cloud computing is the cornerstone for elastic and on-demand service provisioning to achieve more efficient resource utilisation and quicker responses to varying application loads. Virtual machines, one of the building blocks of clouds, can be created using provider specific templates stored in proprietary repositories, which may lead to provider lock-in and decreased portability. Despite these enabling technologies, large scale service oriented applications are still mostly inelastic. Such applications often use monolithic services that limit the elasticity (e.g., by obstructing the replicability of parts of a monolithic service). Decomposing these services to smaller, more targeted and more modular services would open towards elasticity, but the decomposition process is mostly manual. This paper introduces a methodology for decomposing monolithic services to several so called microservices. The proposed methodology applies several achievements of the ENTICE project: its image synthesis and optimisation tools. Finally, the paper provides insights on how these achievements help revitalise past monolithic services, and what techniques are applied to aid future microservice developers