Tools for Refactoring to Microservices: A Preliminary Usability Report

Abstract: While Microservices are a preferred choice for modern cloud-based applications, the migration and architectural refactoring of existing legacy systems is still a major challenge in industry. To address this, academia has proposed many strategies and approaches that aim to automate the process of decomposing a monolith into functional units. In this study, we review existing migration approaches regarding techniques used and tool support. From 91 publications, we extracted 22 tools, 7 of which address service decomposition. To assess them from an end-user perspective, we investigated their underlying techniques, installation, documentation, usability and support. For 5 of them, we generated service cuts using reference applications. The results of our preliminary work suggest that the inspected tools pursue promising concepts, but lack maturity and generalizability for reliable use by industry.