Identifying Microservices Using Functional Decomposition

The microservices architectural style is rising fast, and many companies use this style to structure their systems. A big challenge in designing this architecture is to find an appropriate partition of the system into microservices. Microservices are usually designed intuitively, based on the experience of the designers. We describe a systematic approach to identify microservices in early design phase which is based on the specification of the system’s functional requirements and that uses functional decomposition. To evaluate our approach, we have compared microservices implementations by three independent teams to the decomposition provided by our approach. The evaluation results show that our decomposition is comparable to manual design, yet within a much shorter time frame.

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