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Challenges When Moving from Monolith to Microservice Architecture

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Current Trends in Web Engineering (ICWE 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10544))

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Abstract

One of the more recent avenues towards more flexible installations and execution is the transition from monolithic architecture to microservice architecture. In such architecture, where microservices can be more liberally updated, relocated, and replaced, building liquid software also becomes simpler, as adaptation and deployment of code is easier than when using a monolithic architecture where almost everything is connected. In this paper, we study this type of transition. The objective is to identify the reasons why the companies decide to make such transition, and identify the challenges that companies may face during this transition. Our method is a survey based on different publications and case studies conducted about these architectural transitions from monolithic architecture to microservices. Our findings reveal that typical reasons moving towards microservice architecture are complexity, scalability and code ownership. The challenges, on the other hand, can be separated to architectural challenges and organizational challenges. The conclusion is that when a software company grows big enough in size and starts facing problems regarding the size of the codebase, that is when microservices can be a good way to handle the complexity and size. Even though the transition provides its own challenges, these challenges can be easier to solve than the challenges that monolithic architecture presents to company.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the Academy of Finland (project 295913).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Miika Kalske, Niko Mäkitalo & Tommi Mikkonen

Authors
  1. Miika Kalske
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  2. Niko Mäkitalo
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  3. Tommi Mikkonen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Miika Kalske .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Irene Garrigós

  2. Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Manuel Wimmer

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Kalske, M., Mäkitalo, N., Mikkonen, T. (2018). Challenges When Moving from Monolith to Microservice Architecture. In: Garrigós, I., Wimmer, M. (eds) Current Trends in Web Engineering. ICWE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10544. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74433-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74433-9_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74432-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74433-9

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