Migrations to Microservices-Based Architectures - a Tale of Technical and Organizational Change

Abstract: As software systems evolve and scale faster than the foundations on which they are structured on, software architecture migrations to modern, cutting edge paradigms of development are becoming common. An example of such a paradigm is Microservices-based Architectures (MSAs). With MSAs, organizations can manage the complexity of their software and deploy individual pieces autonomously and independently. However, migrating towards microservices entails a lot of complexity. The evolution of the structures that a migration predisposes is multifaceted, with a socio-technical nature. Therefore, this thesis aims to first of all understand the process in which decisions are made by engineers to migrate their software architecture towards microservices. In addition, this thesis targets to aggregate the migration journey of organizations that change their software architecture to microservices. Finally, it is demonstrated how an organization's operations implement different processes for software architecture migrations and development methodologies.