Mono2Micro: A Practical and Effective Tool for Decomposing Monolithic Java Applications to Microservices

TL;DR

Mono2Micro is a practical tool that effectively decomposes monolithic Java applications into microservices by leveraging runtime call relations and business use cases, outperforming existing techniques in key metrics.

Contribution

The paper introduces Mono2Micro, a novel tool for decomposing monolithic applications into microservices, demonstrating its superior performance and positive practitioner perceptions.

Findings

Mono2Micro outperforms existing decomposition techniques in key metrics.

Practitioners find Mono2Micro beneficial for creating cohesive microservice architectures.

The tool is effective across open-source and proprietary Java applications.

Abstract

In migrating production workloads to cloud, enterprises often face the daunting task of evolving monolithic applications toward a microservice architecture. At IBM, we developed a tool called Mono2Micro to assist with this challenging task. Mono2Micro performs spatio-temporal decomposition, leveraging well-defined business use cases and runtime call relations to create functionally cohesive partitioning of application classes. Our preliminary evaluation of Mono2Micro showed promising results. How well does Mono2Micro perform against other decomposition techniques, and how do practitioners perceive the tool? This paper describes the technical foundations of Mono2Micro and presents results to answer these two questions. To answer the first question, we evaluated Mono2Micro against four existing techniques on a set of open-source and proprietary Java applications and using different metrics to assess the quality of decomposition and tool's efficiency. Our results show that Mono2Micro significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in specific metrics well-defined for the problem domain. To answer the second question, we conducted a survey of twenty-one practitioners in various industry roles who have used Mono2Micro. This study highlights several benefits of the tool, interesting practitioner perceptions, and scope for further improvements. Overall, these results show that Mono2Micro can provide a valuable aid to practitioners in creating functionally cohesive and explainable microservice decompositions.