Charting Microservices to Support Services’ Developers: The Anaximander Approach

Microservice architectures have gained popularity in the last ten years, based on their intrinsic capabilities of implementing scalable software architectures. However, understanding a microservice architecture is still a challenging task for software architects. Current state-of-the-art approaches addressing this challenge focus on exhaustive solutions, working in an all-or-nothing way. These all-or-nothing solutions rely on heuristics to create one map of a given architecture, using static and/or dynamic analysis of the existing source code. This is not compatible with the classical approaches used in software comprehension, that relies on the exploration of a program in an incremental way. In this paper, we leverage the exploration metaphor and describes the Anaximander approach to support the incremental definition of a map that suits the needs of the architect exploring an architecture. Using probes working at different levels of abstraction and precision, one can incrementally chart a map representing the architecture and leverage the map by querying it. We applied the Anaximander approach to six reference microservice architecture published by major actors from the state-of-practice.