Towards recovering the software architecture of microservice-based systems

Today the microservice architectural style is being adopted by many key technological players such as Netflix, Amazon, The Guardian. A microservice architecture is composed of a large set of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms (often via REST APIs). If on one side having a large set of independently developed services helps in terms of developer productivity, scalability, maintainability, on the other side it is very difficult to have a clear understanding of the overall architecture of a microservice-based software system, specially when the deployment and operation of the involved microservices evolves at run-time. In this paper we present MicroART, an architecture recovery approach for microservice-based systems. By using Model-Driven Engineering techniques, we leverage a suitably defined domain-specific language for representing the key aspects of the architecture of a microservice-based system and provide a tool-chain for automatically extracting architecture models of the system. The only inputs of MicroART are: (i) a GitHub repository containing the source code of the system and (ii) a reference to the container engine managing it. We validated MicroART on a publicly available benchmark system, with promising results.