Researchers propose unified model for microservice refactoring

Ana Almeida and António Rito Silva propose a unified feature model for variant-rich microservice identification tools, grounded in an extensive analysis of the state of the art. Their evaluation shows the model captures the primary variation points of existing methodologies—and while no individual tool covers more than a fraction of the model, the analyzed tools jointly span almost all of them. The central finding: the design space is already populated, but fragmented across standalone tools that cannot compare or integrate the alternatives others implement. This points to a clear need for integrating multiple approaches to fully explore the trade-offs in monolith-to-microservice migration.