The Migration Journey Towards Microservices

Organizations initiate migration projects in order to change their software architecture towards microservices and ripe the many benefits that microservices have to offer. However, migrations often take place in unstructured, non-systemic, and trial-and-error manners, resulting in unclarity and uncertainty in such projects. In this study, we investigate 16 software development organizations that migrated towards microservices and we chart their detailed migration journey. We do so by conducting an interview survey using some of the tools from Grounded Theory in 19 interviews from 16 organizations. Our results showcase the evolutionary and iterative nature of the migration journey at an architectural-level and system-implementation level. Also, we identify 18 detailed activities that take place in these levels, categorized in the four phases of 1) designing the architecture, 2) altering the system, 3) setting up supporting artifacts, and 4) implementing additional technical artifacts.