Migration to the cloud has been a popular topic in industry and academia in
recent years. Despite many benefits that the cloud presents, such as high
availability and scalability, most of the on-premise application architectures
are not ready to fully exploit the benefits of this environment, and adapting
them to this environment is a non-trivial task. Microservices have appeared
recently as novel architectural styles that are native to the cloud. These
cloud-native architectures can facilitate migrating on-premise architectures to
fully benefit from the cloud environments because non-functional attributes,
like scalability, are inherent in this style. The existing approaches on cloud
migration does not mostly consider cloud-native architectures as their
first-class citizens. As a result, the final product may not meet its primary
drivers for migration. In this paper, we intend to report our experience and
lessons learned in an ongoing project on migrating a monolithic on-premise
software architecture to microservices. We concluded that microservices is not
a one-fit-all solution as it introduces new complexities to the system, and
many factors, such as distribution complexities, should be considered before
adopting this style. However, if adopted in a context that needs high
flexibility in terms of scalability and availability, it can deliver its
promised benefits