An Approach to Extract the Architecture of Microservice-Based Software Systems

Abstract

Microservices decouple network-accessible system components to support independent development, deployment, and scalability. The architecture of microservice-based software systems is typically not defined upfront but emerges by dynamically assembling services to systems. This makes it hard to extract component relations from static sources since component relationships may only become evident at runtime. Existing systems focus either on the static structure of service relations, neglecting runtime properties, or on (short-term) monitoring of runtime properties to detect errors. We present an approach to extract and analyze the architecture of a microservice-based software system based on a combination of static service information with infrastructure-related and aggregated runtime information.