NETE Review of Architectural Patterns and Tactics for Microservices in Academic and Industrial Literature

Abstract

Microservices are an emerging trend for
development of service-oriented software. This approach
proposes to build each application as a collection of small services
running on separate process and inter-communicating with
lightweight mechanisms. Systematic development of
microservices is hampered by the lack of a catalog of emerging
recurrent architectural solutions (architectural patterns) and
design decisions (architectural tactics). This article describes a
systematic review of academic and industrial literature regarding
architectural patterns and architectural tactics for microservices.
The review yield 44 architectural patterns in academic sources
and 74 in industrial ones, as well as a few architectural tactics
originally proposed to address related problems. Most
architectural patterns and tactics are associated to one of just five
quality attributes: scalability, flexibility, testability, performance,
and elasticity. Also, most microservices in academic (but not
industrial) literature are related to DevOps and IoT. The findings
lead to propose a new taxonomy of microservice architectural
patterns.