On the modernization of ExplorViz towards a microservice architecture

Software systems evolve during their lifetime and therefore face several challenges. Changing requirements or upcoming feature requests make modifications or extensions inevitable. Especially long-living software systems have often been built as monolithic applications and are based on obsolescent architectures and technologies. This circumstance makes it dificult for developers to maintain or extend software. In this paper, we report on the modernization process of our open source research project ExplorViz - moving from a monolithic towards a microservice architecture. We describe our previous version within the project and present how we solved the modernization and handled occurring problems. Afterwards, we illustrate our modernized software system and point out the obtained benefits. Finally, we delineate open questions for the ongoing development.</p