Exploration of academic and industrial evidence about architectural tactics and patterns in microservices

Abstract

Microservices are quickly becoming an outstanding architectural choice in the service-oriented software industry. This approach proposes to develop each application as a collection of small services, each running on its process and inter-communicating with lightweight mechanisms. Currently, there is still no clear perspective of emerging recurrent solutions (architectural patterns) or design decisions (architectural tactics) in microservices both in industry and academia. This article describes a systematic review of the academic and industrial literature on architectural patterns and tactics proposed for microservices. The study reported: 44 architectural patterns of microservices in academia and 80 in the industry; architectural tactics related to microservices dependent on other disciplines; and it was also found that most of architectural patterns and tactics are associated to five quality attributes: scalability, flexibility, testability, performance, and elasticity. Added to that results, it was noticed that most microservices in the academic area are reported in evidence related to DevOps and IoT, but the industry is not interested in associating disciplines. Finally, a new proposal of microservices pattern taxonomy is suggested.