Migrating to Microservices

how do teams migrate to microservices?

Organizations in many industries are increasingly adopting Microservices-based Software Architectures (MSAs) for designing, developing, testing and maintaining software systems, in order to scale-up their Development and Operations capabilities. However, transitioning to MSAs is easier said than done.

Migrating to microservices

In our research, we primarily study the migration process to MSAs through a socio-technical lense. That is, we view microservices not only, or even primarily, as a technical solution, but as an organizational solution that involves people, processes, and technology.

Our contributions in this area include:

  • Decision-making processes for migrations to microservices, and aggregated migration journeys from various organizations and technical solutions used by practitioners (Michael Ayas et al., 2023).
  • Testing in microservices, particularly related to consumer-driven contract testing (Ayas et al., 2022).
  • Mining repositories and studying job-ads to classify the roles, responsibilities and skills of engineers working with microservices (Michael Ayas et al., 2024) (Ayas et al., 2024).

Contacts:

Hamdy Michael Ayas

Dr. Philipp Leitner


  1. An empirical study of the systemic and technical migration towards microservices
    Hamdy Michael Ayas, Philipp Leitner, and Regina Hebig
    Empirical Software Engineering, May 2023
  2. An Empirical Analysis of Microservices Systems Using Consumer-Driven Contract Testing
    Hamdy Michael Ayas, Hartmut Fischer, Philipp Leitner, and Francisco Gomes De Oliveira Neto
    In 2022 48th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) , May 2022
  3. JSS
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    An empirical investigation on the competences and roles of practitioners in Microservices-based Architectures
    Hamdy Michael Ayas, Regina Hebig, and Philipp Leitner
    Journal of Systems and Software, May 2024
  4. The Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills of Engineers in the Era of Microservices-Based Architectures
    Hamdy Michael Ayas, Regina Hebig, and Philipp Leitner
    In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2023) , Lisbon, Portugal, May 2024