Modernization of Legacy Systems to Microservice Architecture: A Tertiary Study

Modernization of legacy systems to Microservice Architecture (MSA) has been a subject of interest in both academia and industry. MSA facilitates the development of systems by composing them as a collection of small, loosely coupled, and independent services. Despite the importance of this architectural style for system modernization, there is a lack of comprehensive study of how the modernization process must be conducted, regarding the main steps that must be executed, besides architectural patterns that may be used during this process. The goal of this paper is to provide a panorama and analysis, providing a panorama on the modernization of legacy systems to MSA. To do so, we conducted a tertiary study following the guidelines of a Systematic Mapping Study, based on 20 secondary studies. Our overview reveals some evidence related to modernization, such as the main motivations, the main architectural patterns, and the macro steps of a process. Moreover, a discussion of the main findings is addressed in our study. As the study presented in this paper addresses a research theme that is constantly evolving, the presented panorama may be an important guide for researchers and practitioners in the development of future work to advance and consolidate such theme.