Migrating Monolithic Mobile Application to Microservice Architecture: An Experiment Report

Abstract

The microservice architecture (MSA) is an emerging cloud software system, which provides fine-grained, self-contained service components (microservices) used in the construction of complex software systems. DevOps techniques are commonly used to automate the process of development and operation through continuous integration and continuous deployment. Monitoring software systems created by DevOps, makes it possible for MSA to obtain the feedback necessary to improve the system quickly and easily. Nonetheless, systematic, SDLC-driven methods (SDLC: software development life cycle) are lacking to facilitate the migration of software systems from a traditional monolithic architecture to MSA. Therefore, this paper proposes a migration process based on SDLC, including all of the methods and tools required during design, development, and implementation. The mobile application, EasyLearn, was used as an illustrative example to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed migration process. We believe that this paper could provide valuable references for other development teams seeking to facilitate the migration of existing applications to MSA.