Microvision: Static analysis-based approach to visualizing microservices in augmented reality

TL;DR

This paper presents a static analysis-based method for reconstructing microservice architectures and visualizing them in augmented reality to improve system understanding and management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining static analysis with 3D AR visualization for microservice architecture reconstruction.

Findings

Prototype tools successfully visualize microservice architectures in AR.

The approach enhances understanding of system properties and dependencies.

Static analysis enables scalable system modeling in high service cardinality environments.

Abstract

Microservices are supporting digital transformation; however, fundamental tools and system perspectives are missing to better observe, understand, and manage these systems, their properties, and their dependencies. Microservices architecture leans toward decentralization, which yields many advantages to system operation; it, however, brings challenges to their development. Microservices lack a system-centric perspective to better cope with system evolution and quality assessment. In this work, we explore microservice-specific architecture reconstruction based on static analysis. Such reconstruction typically results in system models to visualize selected system-centric perspectives. Conventional models are limited in utility when the service cardinality is high. We consider an alternative data visualization using 3D space using augmented reality. To begin testing the feasibility of deriving such perspectives from microservice systems, we developed and implemented prototype tools for software architecture reconstruction and visualization of compared perspectives.