Patterns for Migration of SOA Based Applications to Microservices Architecture

Service oriented architecture (SOA) has been widely used in the design of enterprise applications over the last two decades. Though SOA has become popular in the integration of multiple applications using the enterprise service bus, there are few challenges related to delivery, deployment, governance, and interoperability of services. To overcome the design and maintenance challenges in SOA, a new architecture of microservices has emerged with loose coupling, independent deployment, and scalability as its key features. With the advent of microservices, software architects have started to migrate legacy systems to microservice architecture. However, many challenges arise during the migration of SOA to microservices, including the decomposition of SOA to microservice, the testing of microservices designed using different programming languages, and the monitoring the microservices. In this paper, we aim to provide patterns for the most recurring problems highlighted in the literature i.e, the decomposition of SOA services, the size of each microservice, and the detection of anomalies in microservices. The suggested patterns are combined with our experience in the migration of SOA-based applications to the microservices architecture, and we have also used these patterns in the migration of other SOA applications. We evaluated these patterns with the help of a standard web-based application.