Stepwise Migration of a Monolith to a Microservices Architecture: Performance and Migration Effort Evaluation

The agility inherent to today's business promotes the definition of software architectures where the business entities are decoupled into modules and/or services. However, there are advantages in having a rich domain model, where domain entities are tightly connected, because it fosters an initial quick development. On the other hand, the split of the business logic into modules and/or services, its encapsulation through well-defined interfaces and the introduction of inter-service communication introduces a cost in terms of performance. In this paper we analyze the stepwise migrating of a monolith, using a rich domain object, into a microservice architecture, where a modular monolith architecture is used as an intermediate step. The impact on the migration effort and on performance is measured for both steps. Current state of the art analyses the migration of monolith systems to a microservices architecture, but we observed that migration effort and performance issues are already significant in the migration to a modular monolith. Therefore, a clear distinction is established for each one of the steps, which may inform software architects on the planning of the migration of monolith systems. In particular, the trade-offs of doing all the migration process or just migrating to a modular monolith.