Migration strategies from monolithic systems to Kubernetes-native microservices in enterprise environments
TL;DR
There needs to be more evidence in the field on production-scale economics of migration, platform reliability, socio-technical governance, and measurable results in different and diverse enterprise domains, according to peer-reviewed research.
Abstract
As legacy application architectures can limit the ability to deliver quickly, engineer for resilience, scale, and deploy independently, enterprise migration to microservices running on Kubernetes has emerged as a key modernization priority. This review analyzes peer-reviewed research in the field of migration patterns, service decomposition, containerization, orchestration, technical debt, organizational readiness and runtime governance in enterprise contexts. The literature suggests that full architectural replacement is seldom the most effective migration path. Instead, incremental extraction, a well-defined service-boundary understanding, platform engineering capability, observability maturity, data ownership redesign, and a staged coexistence between legacy and cloud-native elements are essential for durable modernization. Reported studies also highlight current shortcomings, such as poor longitudinal evidence, inconsistent migration measures, only minimal empirical validation for Kubernetes, and inadequate attention to regulated enterprise constraints. The review builds an abbreviated conceptual framework for migration to Kubernetes and draws inferences from comparative results from reported studies. It concludes that there needs to be more evidence in the field on production-scale economics of migration, platform reliability, socio-technical governance, and measurable results in different and diverse enterprise domains.