Function-splitting heuristics for discovery of microservices in enterprise systems

Abstract

We present heuristics that help to identify suitable consumer-oriented parts of enterprise systems which could be re-engineered as microservices. Our approach assesses the key structural and behavioural properties common to both enterprise and microservice systems, as needed to guide a microservices discovery process and coherently assess restructuring recommendations. Building upon existing business object and system structural definitions, we present heuristics for two fundamental areas of microservice discovery, namely function splitting based on object subtypes (i.e., the lowest granularity of software based on structural properties) and functional splitting based on common execution fra..