Microservice Decompositon: A Case Study of a Large Industrial Software Migration in the Automotive Industry

摘要

In a microservice architecture a set of relatively small services is deployed, who communicate with each other only over the network. Monoliths regularly suffer from poor scalability and maintainability. Several approaches for decomposing them into microservices have been proposed with the aim to improve these characteristics. However, precise descriptions of these approaches in combination with large scale industrial evaluations are still rare in academic literature. This case study focuses on a large ERP system in the automotive industry. We applied an approach based on the concept of bounded contexts for one such decomposition and documented necessary changes to the system, like the introduction of facades to facilitate incremental migration towards microservices in a non-distruptive manner. Further we conduct expert interviews to evaluate our findings. While the migration is still ongoing, we were able to achieve significant adoption rates of the new paradigm and a clear preference of architects and developers to use it. Development speed has also drastically improved.