MICROLYZE: A Framework for Recovering the Software Architecture in Microservice-Based Environments

Microservices are an approach to distributed systems that promote the use of finely grained services with their own lifecycles. This architecture style encourages high decoupling, independent deployment, operation and maintenance. However, those benefits also leave a certain aftertaste, especially in continuous documentation of the overall architecture. It is fundamental to keep track of how microservices emerge over time. This knowledge is documented manually in Enterprise Architecture (EA) tools, which leads to an obsolete status. For that reason, we present a novel multi-layer microservice architecture recovery approach called MICROLYZE that recovers the infrastructure in realtime based on the EA model involving the business, application, hardware layer and the corresponding relationship between each other. It leverages existing monitoring tools and combines the run-time data with static built-time information. Hereby, MICROLYZE provide tool support for mapping the business activities with technical transactions in order to recover the correlation between the business and application layer.