Processes, Motivations, and Issues for Migrating to Microservices Architectures: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

In this paper, we identify a process framework based on the comparison of three different migration processes adopted by the interviewed practitioners, together with the common motivations and issues that commonly take place during migrations. In this work, we describe the results and provide an analysis of our survey, which includes a comparison of the migration processes, a ranking of motivations, and issues and some insights into the benefits achieved after the adoption. Maintainability and scalability were consistently ranked as the most important motivations, along with a few other technical and nontechnical motivations. Although return on investment was expected to take longer, the reduced maintenance effort in the long run was considered to highly compensate for this.