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Microservice architecture design requires the architect to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders and to address their needs for maintainability, scalability, and availability. In the microservice architecture context, a comprehensive performance and scalability assessment is a dynamic activity, which is focused on the detection of service level metric deviations from objectives using a defined operational profile. Root cause analysis is focused on the identification of the activated microservice components given the defined load profile. Therefore, performance issues are identified by detecting dynamic deviations from the expected behaviors of the service level metric.In contrast, microservice architecture assessment focus is on identifying implicit relations among microservice components. Architecture anti-patterns are identified by detecting deviations from the defined formal design patterns. As the ultimate objective of microservice architecture design is to build high-quality applications it would be expected that architecture refactoring based on the removal of architecture anti-patterns will result in meeting stakeholder needs of better scalability and availability.In this paper we present an empirical assessment of architecture anti-pattern detection in combination with the identification of performance issues using two state of the art tools: DV8 for architecture and PPTAM for performance. We make use of Train Ticket, i.e., a benchmark microservice system, and we observed the co-occurrence of architectural (Clique) and performance (Blob) anti-patterns, noting that high coupling shows much worse performance scores. We have found strong correlation between the normalized distance performance metric and architecture coupling values using several similarity metrics. Our empirical results show that operational profile based performance testing and analysis can be used to help prioritize architecture refactoring.
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This content will become publicly available on February 1, 2026
Refactoring Microservices to Microservices in Support of Evolutionary Design
Evolutionary design is a widely accepted practice for defining microservice boundaries. It is performed through a sequence of incremental refactoring tasks (we call it “microservice refactoring”), each restructuring only part of a microservice system (a.k.a., refactoring part) into well-defined services for improving the architecture in a controlled manner. Despite its popularity in practice, microservice refactoring suffers from insufficient methodological support. While there are numerous studies addressing similar software design tasks, i.e., software remodularization and microservitization, their approaches prove inadequate when applied to microservice refactoring. Our analysis reveals that their approaches may even degrade the entire architecture in microservice refactoring, as they only optimize the refactoring part in such applications, but neglect the relationships between the refactoring part and the remaining system. As the first response to the need, Micro2Micro is proposed to re-partition the refactoring part while optimizing three quality objectives including the interdependence between the refactoring and non-refactoring parts. In addition, it allows architects to intervene in the decision-making process by interactively incorporating their knowledge into the iterative search for optimal refactoring solutions. An empirical study on 13 open-source projects of different sizes shows that the solutions from Micro2Micro perform well and exhibit quality improvement with an average up to 45% to the original architecture. Users of Micro2Micro found the suggested solutions highly satisfactory. They acknowledge the advantages in terms of infusing human intelligence into decisions, providing immediate quality feedback, and quick exploration capability.
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- PAR ID:
- 10590289
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Volume:
- 51
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0098-5589
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 484 to 502
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Microservice boundaries evolutionary design architecture refactoring
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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