Context: Microservices Architecture (MSA) has received significant attention in the software industry. However, little empirical evidence exists on design, monitoring, and testing of microservices systems. Objective: This research aims to gain a deep understanding of how microservices systems are designed, monitored, and tested in the industry. Method: A mixed-methods study was conducted with 106 survey responses and 6 interviews from microservices practitioners. Results: The main findings are: (1) a combination of domain-driven design and business capability is the most used strategy to decompose an application into microservices, (2) over half of the participants used architecture evaluation and architecture implementation when designing microservices systems, (3) API gateway and Backend for frontend patterns are the most used MSA patterns, (4) resource usage and load balancing as monitoring metrics, log management and exception tracking as monitoring practices are widely used, (5) unit and end-to-end testing are the most used testing strategies, and (6) the complexity of microservices systems poses challenges for their design, monitoring, and testing, for which there are no dedicated solutions. Conclusions: Our findings reveal that more research is needed to (1) deal with microservices complexity at the design level, (2) handle security in microservices systems, and (3) address the monitoring and testing challenges through dedicated solutions.
Researchers and practitioners have recently proposed many Microservices Architecture (MSA) patterns and strategies covering various aspects of microservices system life cycle, such as service design and security. However, selecting and implementing these patterns and strategies can entail various challenges for microservices practitioners. To this end, this study proposes decision models for selecting patterns and strategies covering four MSA design areas: application decomposition into microservices, microservices security, microservices communication, and service discovery. We used peer-revi…
Several companies are re-architecting their monolithic information systems with microservices. However, many companies migrated without experience on microservices, mainly learning how to migrate from books or from practitioners' blogs. Because of the novelty of the topic, practitioners and consultancy are learning by doing how to migrate, thus facing several issues but also several benefits. In this chapter, we introduce a catalog and a taxonomy of the most common microservices anti-patterns in order to identify common problems. Our anti-pattern catalogue is based on the experience summarized…
Microservices architectures have become largely popular in the last years. However, we still lack empirical evidence about the use of microservices and the practices followed by practitioners. Thereupon, in this paper, we report the results of a survey with 122 professionals who work with microservices. We report how the industry is using this architectural style and whether the perception of practitioners regarding the advantages and challenges of microservices is according to the literature.
Microservices Architecture (MSA) style is a promising design approach to develop software applications consisting of multiple small and independently deployable services. Over the past few years, researchers and practitioners have proposed many MSA patterns and strategies covering various aspects of microservices design, such as application decomposition. However, selecting appropriate patterns and strategies can entail various challenges for practitioners. To this end, this study proposes a decision model for selecting patterns and strategies to decompose applications into microservices. We u…
Cloud-based application deployment is becoming increasingly popular among businesses, thanks to the emergence of microservices. However, securing such architectures is a challenging task since traditional security concepts cannot be directly applied to microservice architectures due to their distributed nature. The situation is exacerbated by the scattered nature of guidelines and best practices advocated by practitioners and organizations in this field. This research paper we aim to shay light over the current microservice security discussions hidden within Grey Literature (GL) sources. Parti…
In migrating production workloads to cloud, enterprises often face the daunting task of evolving monolithic applications toward a microservice architecture. At IBM, we developed a tool called Mono2Micro to assist with this challenging task. Mono2Micro performs spatio-temporal decomposition, leveraging well-defined business use cases and runtime call relations to create functionally cohesive partitioning of application classes. Our preliminary evaluation of Mono2Micro showed promising results. How well does Mono2Micro perform against other decomposition techniques, and how do practitioners perc…
Microservice system solutions are driving digital transformation; however, fundamental tools and system perspectives are missing to better observe, understand, and manage these systems, their properties, and their dependencies. Microservices architecture leads towards decentralization, which implies many advantages to system operation; it, however, brings challenges to their development. Microservice systems often lack a system-centric perspective that would help engineers better cope with system evolution and quality assessment. In this work, we explored microservice-specific architecture rec…
Despite the numerous benefits of microservices systems, security has been a critical issue in such systems. Several factors explain this difficulty, including a knowledge gap among microservices practitioners on properly securing a microservices system. To (partially) bridge this gap, we conducted an empirical study. We first manually analyzed 861 microservices security points, including 567 issues, 9 documents, and 3 wiki pages from 10 GitHub open-source microservices systems and 306 Stack Overflow posts concerning security in microservices systems. In this study, a microservices security poi…
Microservices have become a popular architectural style for data-driven applications, given their ability to functionally decompose an application into small and autonomous services to achieve scalability, strong isolation, and specialization of database systems to the workloads and data formats of each service. Despite the accelerating industrial adoption of this architectural style, an investigation of the state of the practice and challenges practitioners face regarding data management in microservices is lacking. To bridge this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review of representa…
Lack of awareness and knowledge of microservices-specific security challenges and solutions often leads to ill-informed security decisions in microservices system development. We claim that identifying and leveraging security discussions scattered in existing microservices systems can partially close this gap. We define security discussion as "a paragraph from developer discussions that includes design decisions, challenges, or solutions relating to security". We first surveyed 67 practitioners and found that securing microservices systems is a unique challenge and that having access to securi…
Reusable microservice artefacts are often deployed as black or grey boxes, with little concern for their properties and quality, beyond a syntactical interface description. This leads application developers to chaotic and opportunistic assumptions about how a composite application will behave in the real world. Systematically analyzing and tracking these publicly available artefacts will grant much needed predictability to microservice-based deployments. By establishing a distributed observatory and knowledge base, it is possible to track microservice repositories and analyze the artefacts rel…
Microservice architecture advocates a number of technologies and practices such as lightweight container, container orchestration, and DevOps, with the promised benefits of faster delivery, improved scalability, and greater autonomy. However, microservice systems implemented in industry vary a lot in terms of adopted practices and achieved benefits, drastically different from what is advocated in the literature. In this article, we conduct an empirical study, including an online survey with 51 responses and 14 interviews for experienced microservice experts to advance our understanding regardi…
In recent years, microservice architecture has become a popular architectural style in software engineering, with its natural support for DevOps and continuous delivery, as well as its scalability and extensibility, which drive industry practitioners to migrate to microservice architecture. However, there are many challenges in adopting a microservice architecture, the most important of which is how to properly decomposition a monolithic system into microservices. Currently, microservice decomposition decisions for monolithic systems rely on subjective human experience, which is a costly, time…
Microservice-based systems are often complex to understand, especially when their sizes grow. Abstracted views help practitioners with the system understanding from a certain perspective. Recent advancement in interactive data visualization begs the question of whether established software engineering models to visualize system design remain the most suited approach for the service-oriented design of microservices. Our recent work proposed presenting a 3D visualization for microservices in augmented reality. This paper analyzes whether such an approach brings any benefits to practitioners when…
The microservice software architecture is more scalable and efficient than its monolithic predecessor. Despite its increasing adoption, microservices might expose security concerns and issues that are distinct from those associated with monolithic designs. We propose Microusity, a tool that performs RESTful API testing on a specific type of microservice pattern called back end for front end (BFF). We design a novel approach to trace BFF requests using the port mapping between requests to BFF and the sub-requests sent to back-end microservices. Furthermore, our tool can pinpoint which of the ba…
Performance analysis of microservices can be a challenging task, as a typical request to these systems involves multiple Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) spanning across independent services and machines. Practitioners primarily rely on distributed tracing tools to closely monitor microservices performance. These tools enable practitioners to trace, collect, and visualize RPC workflows and associated events in the context of individual end-to-end requests. While effective for analyzing individual end-to-end requests, current distributed tracing visualizations often fall short in providing a compre…
Context: Applying Microservices Architecture (MSA) in DevOps has received significant attention in recent years. However, there exists no comprehensive review of the state of research on this topic. Objective: This work aims to systematically identify, analyze, and classify the literature on MSA in DevOps. Method: A Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) has been conducted on the literature published between January 2009 and July 2018. Results: Forty-seven studies were finally selected and the key results are: (1) Three themes on the research on MSA in DevOps are "microservices development and operati…
Microservices fuel cloud-native systems with small service sets developed and deployed independently. The independent nature of this modular architecture also leads to challenges and gaps. The intended system design might deviate far from what is eventually produced and maintained as the architecture tends to degrade over time. This paper challenges the audience on how static analysis could contribute to microservice system development and management, particularly managing architectural degradation. It elaborates on challenges and needed changes in the traditional code analysis to better fit t…
This paper takes up the problem of medical resource sharing through MicroService architecture without compromising patient privacy. To achieve this goal, we suggest refactoring the legacy EHR systems into autonomous MicroServices communicating by the unified techniques such as RESTFul web service. This lets us handle clinical data queries directly and far more efficiently for both internal and external queries. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in avoiding the data de-identification process often used as a means of preserving patient privacy. The implemented toolkit combines software e…
Online and offline analytics have been traditionally treated separately in software architecture design, and there is no existing general architecture that can support both. Our objective is to go beyond and introduce a scalable and maintainable architecture for performing online as well as offline analysis of streaming data. In this paper, we propose a 7-layered architecture utilising microservices, publish-subscribe pattern, and persistent storage. The architecture ensures high cohesion, low coupling, and asynchronous communication between the layers, thus yielding a scalable and maintainabl…
To ensure an efficient and environmentally friendly water resource management, water management associations need means for efficient water monitoring as well as novel strategies to reduce the pollution of surface and ground water. Traditionally, water management associations operate large sensor networks to suffice their needs for hydrological and meteorological measurement data to monitor and model physical processes within catchments. Implementing a comprehensive monitoring system often suffers from sparse coverage of in-situ data. Due to the evolvement of the Copernicus satellite platforms…
Modern software development and operations rely on monitoring to understand how systems behave in production. The data provided by application logs and runtime environment are essential to detect and diagnose undesired behavior and improve system reliability. However, despite the rich ecosystem around industry-ready log solutions, monitoring complex systems and getting insights from log data remains a challenge. Researchers and practitioners have been actively working to address several challenges related to logs, e.g., how to effectively provide better tooling support for logging decisions to…
Detailed knowledge about the electrical power consumption in industrial production environments is a prerequisite to reduce and optimize their power consumption. Today's industrial production sites are equipped with a variety of sensors that, inter alia, monitor electrical power consumption in detail. However, these environments often lack an automated data collation and analysis. We present a system architecture that integrates different sensors and analyzes and visualizes the power consumption of devices, machines, and production plants. It is designed with a focus on scalability to support …
