The μTOSCA toolchain: Mining, analyzing, and refactoring microservice-based architectures

Exploiting microservices to architect enterprise applications is becoming commonplace. This makes it crucial to provide some support for designing and analyzing microservice-based applications, for example, for understanding whether a microservice-based application adheres to the main design principles of microservices and for choosing how to refactor it when this is not the case. To provide such support, in this article we present the mu Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) toolchain. More precisely, we first introduce the mu TOSCA model to represent the architecture of microservice-based applications with the OASIS standard TOSCA. We then describe a technique to automatically mine the architecture of a microservice-based application and represent it with mu TOSCA, given the Kubernetes deployment of the application. We also present a methodology to analyze the mu TOSCA representation of a microservice-based architecture to systematically identify the architectural smells potentially affecting the corresponding application and to resolve them. Finally, we present two prototype tools, mu Miner and mu Freshener, implementing our mining solution and the support for identifying and resolving architectural smells in microservice-based applications, respectively. We then assess -by discussing some case studies- how effectively mu Miner, mu Freshener, and the mu TOSCA toolchain can support researchers and practitioners working with microservices.