Abstract—Evolving legacy enterprise systems into a lean system architecture has been on the agendas of many enterprises. Recent advance in legacy system evaluation is in favour of microservice technologies, which not only significantly reduce the complexity in deployment of enterprise systems but also enhance the availability of services to system users. However, there are technical challenges to overcome towards a successful transformation. Challenges, relating to information security, container optimisation, the performance of a new system and its deployment, are particularly under concern. To cope with these technical challenges, a new approach is proposed in this paper to govern the evolution of legacy systems into a microservice-based and cloud-hosted architecture. This approach includes a detailed working process, a set of transformation rules towards microservices and their repositories. In addition, a conceptual framework is drawn to provide a comprehensive illustration to this evolution approach. Moreover, a case study is presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed approach on the evaluation of a chosen legacy system, as well as the procedure of system architecture optimisation.
Index Terms—Cloud computing, enterprise legacy system, feature-driven evolution rules, microservices.
Safa Habibullah, Xiaodong Liu, and Zhiyuan Tan are with School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK (email: s.habibullah@napier.ac.uk, x.liu@napier.ac.uk, z.tan@napier.ac.uk).
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Cite:Safa Habibullah, Xiaodong Liu, and Zhiyuan Tan , "An Approach to Evolving Legacy Enterprise System to Microservice-Based Architecture through Feature-Driven Evolution Rules," International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 164-169, 2018.
