Offline Mining of Microservice-based Architectures

Designing, implementing, and operating microservices is known to be complex and costly, mainly due to the multitude of heterogeneous software services forming a microservice-based application. Such tasks can be simpler if a specification of the microservice-based architecture (MSA) of an application is available. At the same time, due to the number of services and service interactions in a MSA, manually generating a specification of such MSA is complex and costly. For this reason, in this paper we present a novel technique for automatically mining the specification of a MSA from its Kubernetes deployment. The obtained MSA specification is in mu TOSCA, a microservice-oriented profile of the human- and machine-readable OASIS standard TOSCA. We also present a prototype implementation of our technique, which we use to assess it by means of case studies based on third-party applications.