Safa Habibullah¹, Xiaodong Liu¹, Zhiyuan Tan¹, Yonghong Zhang², Qi Liu², ¹Edinburgh Napier University, UK and ²Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, China

Evolution has always been a challenge for enterprise computing systems. The microservice based architecture is a new design model which is rapidly becoming one of the most effective means to re-architect legacy enterprise systems and to reengineer them into new modern systems at a relatively low cost. This architectural style has evolved based on a number of different approaches and standards. However, there are quite a few technical challenges which emerge when adopting microservices to revive a legacy enterprise system. In this paper, an evolution framework and a set of feature-driven microservices-oriented evolution rules have been proposed and applied to modernise legacy enterprise systems, with a special emphasis on analysing the implications as regards runtime performance, scalability, maintainability and testability. Testing and evaluation have been carried out in depth, aiming to provide a guidance for the evolution of legacy enterprise systems.

Microservice, Legacy System, Software Evolution, Cloud Environment