Assessing the Impact of Migration from SOA to Microservices Architecture

Microservices has become a buzzword in IT and large enterprise firms such as Netflix, Twitter, Spotify and others have started to design their applications by adopting this new architectural style. A few organizations have started migrating their traditional monolithic and SOA-based applications to microservices in order to benefit from the features of new style. Software architects, on the other hand, are in chaos whether to adopt this new style or not as they are unaware of the pros and cons of microservices architecture. Also, the impact of the migration on SOA-based applications in terms of performance and complexity is unknown, leading to dilemma on the migration process. In this paper, a study of the migration impact on the existing SOA based applications to microservices is presented. For this study, change propagation probability and architectural stability metrics are used to examine the effect of migrating a SOA-based application to microservices architecture. The proposed approach is illustrated on a case study application designed using SOA and then migrated to microservices. It is observed from the results that though the impact of migration is high, migrating to microservices has significant benefits and it is best suitable for large enterprise applications. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.