Abstract
Agility embraces changes in the functional and non-functional requirements. When the latter happens, the architecture needs to evolve, putting architectural refactoring in evidence. Microservices is an architectural style that enables more agility in a system’s architecture, as it favors the evolution of the system by adding new operations. But it also has its liabilities: the number of services can explode, with similar ones being created. Ultimately, that harms the system’s evolution and maintenance. This work addresses these challenges by proposing a catalog of architecture refactorings to promote reusability in Microservices. These refactorings target patterns that embrace data heterogeneity in the APIs and employ metadata to enhance messages and guide processing. We evaluated the catalog with case studies of three real-world applications and conducted change impact analysis in two scenarios: adding a new data provider, and adding a new processing algorithm. The results showed that embracing heterogeneous data in the API enables a more seamless addition of new data providers, and using metadata can strongly decouple the processing algorithms from the data they use. Furthermore, the results point to other improvements in observability, scalability, and infrastructure.