Teaching Microservice Architecture Using DevOps-An Experience Report

In this education paper we outline a course and exercise design aimed at teaching students knowledge and skills in refactoring ("strangling") a monolith architecture into a microservice equivalent using a cross team DevOps process. The core aim of our proposed exercise design is that students are engaged in a realistic DevOps process by working in teams on team specific microservices, negotiating interfaces with other teams while ensuring all microservices will interact seamlessly to provide correct system behavior. Our main contribution is to outline the challenges faced when designing such an exercise, our proposals for solving them, the exercise design itself, guidelines for exercise design, as well as present experiences from two courses using this approach.