Monolith to microservices using deep learning-based community detection

Sammanfattning: The microservice architecture is widely considered to be best practice. Yet, there still exist many companies currently working in monolith systems. This can largely be attributed to the difficult process of updating a systems architecture. The first step in this process is to identify microservices within a monolith. Here, artificial intelligence could be a useful tool for automating the process of microservice identification. The aim of this thesis was to propose a deep learning-based model for the task of microservice identification, and to compare this model to previously proposed approaches. With the goal of helping companies in their endeavour to move towards a microservice-based architecture. In particular, the thesis has evaluated whether the more complex nature of newer deep learning-based techniques can be utilized in order to identify better microservices. The model proposed by this thesis is based on overlapping community detection, where each identified community is considered a microservice candidate. The model was evaluated by looking at cohesion, modularity, and size. Results indicate that the proposed deep learning-based model performs similarly to other state-of-the-art approaches for the task of microservice identification. The results suggest that deep learning indeed helps in finding nontrivial relations within communities, which overall increases the quality of identified microservices, From this it can be concluded that deep learning is a promising technique for the task of microservice identification, and that further research is warranted.