CLAIM: a Lightweight Approach to Identify Microservices in Dockerized Environments

Background: Over the past decade, microservices have surged in popularity within software engineering. From a research viewpoint, mining studies are frequently employed to assess the evolution of diverse microservice properties. Despite the growing need, a validated static method to swiftly identify microservices seems to be currently missing in the literature. Aims: We present Claim, a lightweight static approach that analyzes configuration files to identify microservices in Dockerized environments, specifically designed with mining studies in mind. Method: To validate Claim, we conduct an empirical experiment comprising 20 repositories, 160 microservices, and 13k commits. A priori and manually defined ground truths are used to evaluate Claim's microservice identification effectiveness and efficiency. Results: Claim detects microservices with an accuracy of 82.0%, reports a median execution time of 61ms per commit, and requires in the worst case scenario 125.5s to analyze the history of a repository comprising 1509 commits. With respect to its closest competitor, CLAIM shines most in terms of false positive reduction (-40%). Conclusions: While not able to reconstruct a microservice architecture in its entirety, Claim is an effective and efficient option to swiftly identify microservices in Dockerized environments, and seems especially fitted for software evolution mining studies.