By Vikram Gulati Debasish Banerjee Maja Vukovic 2 min read
May 6, 2020

Automate application refactoring with AI.

Today, only 20% of enterprise workloads are in Cloud, and they were predominately written for cloud architectures. This leaves 80% of legacy applications on-premises, waiting to be modernized for the cloud.

We know that the best way to modernize your business-critical application is to refactor it into microservices—this approach allows microservice to be independently enhanced and scaled, providing agility and improved speed of delivery. IBM’s novel AI technology automates the application refactoring with minimal risk and removes the need for any major rewrite.

Introducing IBM Mono2Micro

Application refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior and semantics. Currently, refactoring is usually done manually and is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone.

We are excited to announce IBM Mono2Micro, which helps you accelerate this journey to cloud by automating the process of application refactoring with AI.

Mono2Micro is based on IBM Research technology that, when applied to the application code and runtime, traces reasons about application behavior, extracts the business logic, and identifies optimal microservice candidates. Microservice recommendations are automatically generated, while taking programming model and application data dependencies into account. The approach minimizes the risk of refactoring and any requirements for significant code rewrite thereby providing you with a huge ROI.

Business logic-based groupings

Mono2Micro analyzes runtime call traces in the context of the business functions they support, which exposes how classes interact, in what sequence, and at what frequency. The underlying artificial intelligence techniques—such as deep learning and machine learning—generate business logic-based class groupings of the runtime call traces to capture causality, functional similarity, and other temporal relations among classes and their methods.

Data dependency and natural seams-based grouping

Mono2Micro further augments the business logic-based groupings with data dependency analysis. It iteratively merges relevant groupings of classes with data dependencies to generate natural seams-based groupings. With these groupings, Mono2Micro minimizes the need to rewrite existing classes.

Overall, Mono2Micro provides a multifaceted view of your monolith-to-microservice refactoring. It can help you understand and arrive at informed and assured decisions on transforming your current applications.

Next steps

Learn more about Mono2Micro and modernizing your applications:

Categories

Artificial intelligence  |  Cloud
Vikram Gulati
Program Director, Development, IBM RPA
Debasish Banerjee
Executive Architect - IBM Cloud Paks
Maja Vukovic
Distinguished Research Staff Member and Manager

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