Microservices and Containers The articles in this special section focus on microservices and containers. These services allow an application to be comprised of many independently operating and scalable components, have become a common service paradigm. The ability to construct an application by provisioning these interoperating components has various advantages, including the isolation and independent development of tools such as keyvalue stores, authentication, logging, and many others. Containers are one type of system infrastructure that is commonly used to support microservices. With container management systems like Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes to control applications and dynamically provision their resources, cloud services can be extremely scalable, reliable, and reactive. However, other systems beyond containers can be used to support microservices, and many applications other than microservices benefit from containerization.

An Approach for Reconstructing Applications to Develop ContainerBased Microservices Microservices are smallscale services that can operate independently. An application consisting of microservice units can be developed independently as a service unit, and it can handle individual logic without being affected by other services. In addition, it is possible to rapidly distribute the configured microservices by a container, and a container orchestration technology that manages the distributed multiple containers can be realized; thus, it is possible to update and distribute the microservices separately. Therefore, many companies are moving away from existing monolithic structures and attempting to switch to microservices. In this paper, we present a method for reconstructing a monolithic application into a containerbased microservice unit. The microservices of data units are derived through the collection and analysis of monolithic design data. Furthermore, we propose a method to generate a template script based on deployment design data so that the derived microservice and support distribution can be implemented in a container environment. The results of a case study conducted verified that the containerbased microservices deployed in this study work properly. In addition, for the development of monolithic applications and the development of containerbased microservices presented in this paper, we confirmed that developing on the basis of microservices is efficient by conducting execution time performance evaluation for API calls at various iterations. Finally, we show that microservices constructed using the proposed method have higher reusability than those constructed using existing methods.