AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET FAQs

Q. What is AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET?

AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET simplifies the process of refactoring applications into independent services. Modernize and transform your applications with an assistive tool that analyzes source code and runtime metrics to create a visual representation of your application and its dependencies. Microservice Extractor for .NET delivers a holistic visualization of applications, assists in code refactoring and extraction of the codebase into separate code projects that teams can develop, build, and operate independently to improve agility, uptime, and scalability.

Q. Who should use AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET?

AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET is for customers looking to break down ASP.NET monolithic applications into smaller code projects that may be deployed as independent services. It is primarily aimed at developers who make code changes to refactor applications. It also assists software architects and business analysts in identifying the business processes that need to be modeled as separate services.

Q. How do I get started with AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET?
Please refer to the user guide to for steps on how to get started.

Q. How much does AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET cost?
It is a free downloadable tool.  

Q. What are the pre-requisites to use Microservice Extractor for .NET?
Microservice Extractor for .NET needs to be installed on a Windows system that has access to buildable source code of the application you are looking to refactor. You need to have an AWS account with AWS CLI profile setup to publish metrics. The application source to be analyzed must be built on .NET Framework 4.0 or higher, .NET Core version 3.1, .NET 5.0, or .NET 6.0. The application code must be written in C#.

Note: Microservice Extractor does not support ASP.NET Web Pages or Razer Pages at this time.  

Q. How does this feature work with other AWS services or tools?
AWS Microservice Extractor is available as a Windows Application that assists developers to extract microservice candidates from monolithic .NET applications. If Porting Assistant, an analysis tool that scans .NET Framework applications and generates a .NET Core compatibility assessment, is installed on the same system, the user can also assess the application for .NET core readiness while onboarding the application into Microservice Extractor.  

Q. How is my source code used by Microservice Extractor for .NET?
Microservice Extractor is a Windows application running on your system. Your source code itself is not used directly by any of AWS cloud services. The source code metadata such as variables, functions, and classes in the project and dependencies among those artifacts are collected and analyzed using heuristics techniques to identify groups of related classes as microservice candidates. Microservice Extractor uses the source code metadata solely for the purpose of generating recommendations, and your data is never stored in cloud services.  

Q. How do I validate a recommendation from Microservice Extractor?
A recommendation is essentially a class or group of classes along with its dependents forming an extractable unit. The recommendations act as a starting point for developers to get started. The developer can customize the recommended group further if needed. In our experience, recommendations help especially when a developer is inheriting a codebase, and looking to understand it better through the software decomposition capability of Microservice Extractor.