Offline Mining of Microservice-Based Architectures (Extended Version)

Designing applications adhering to the key design principles of microservice-based architectures (MSAs) enables fully exploiting the potentials of cloud computing platforms. A specification of an application’s MSA can help determining whether it adheres to such principles, and reasoning on how to refactor it when this is not the case. However, manually generating such a specification is complex and costly, mainly due to the multitude of heterogeneous software services and service interactions forming an MSA. The main objective of this article is to automate the generation of the specification of an existing MSA. We introduce an offline technique for automatically mining the specification of an MSA from its Kubernetes deployment. The mined MSA is expressed in μTOSCA, a microservice-oriented profile of the OASIS standard TOSCA. We also provide an open-source prototype implementation of the proposed mining technique, called μTOM. Four case studies based on four different third-party applications show that our technique can effectively mine the MSAs of existing applications, being it more accurate than its state-of-the-art competitor. The proposed offline mining technique can help researchers and practitioners working with microservices, by enabling them to automatically mine the MSAs of their applications. The obtained MSAs can then be visualised and analysed with existing tools to enhance their adherence to the key design principles of MSAs. © 2023, The Author(s).