A logical architecture design method for microservices architectures

The use of microservices architectures has been widely adopted in software development, especially for cloud-based solutions. Developing such solutions faces several challenges beyond typical architecture and service design concerns, including service exposition (API), inter-service communication, and infrastructure deployment, among others. Although model-driven approaches allow abstracting microservices behavior from the business domain, there is a lack of proper methods for addressing the referred challenges. In this paper, the elicitation of microservices, their identification uses using functionally decomposed UML use cases as input within a logical architecture derivation method, namely an adapted version of the Four Step Rule Set (4SRS), using SoaML diagrams, that responds to microservices specific characteristics. We demonstrate the approach using a scenario within a live industrial project.