Teaching microservice architectures is challenging due to distributed complexity and the gap between academia and industry. Understanding the quality issues students introduce in MSAs is essential to improve education. This study analyzes student-developed microservices using an established anti-pattern taxonomy and derives lessons learned with actionable teaching recommendations. We conducted a longitudinal, project-based course (2023-2025) involving 216 Master's students (67 teams) who designed and deployed a realistic, containerized MSA for a gamified testing platform. The final systems revealed 23 out of 58 known MSA anti-patterns, spanning five categories. Security issues were most frequent, highlighting weaknesses in authentication, authorization, and data protection. Team Organization and Service Interaction problems followed, reflecting limited DevOps experience and difficulties in inter-service coordination. Fewer issues appeared in Intra-service Design and Inter-service Decomposition, suggesting students generally defined service boundaries well. Overall, students prioritized feature delivery over robustness and operational discipline. To address this, we recommend enforcing minimal standards (API contracts, gateways), providing labs on resilient communication, integrating security-by-design practices, and offering CI-CD templates. The paper contributes a realistic, full-scale educational experience and a replicable model for teaching industry-aligned microservice architecture.
Potential benefits such as agile service delivery have led many companies to deliver their business capabilities through microservices. Bad smells are however always around the corner, as witnessed by the considerable body of literature discussing architectural smells that possibly violate the design principles of microservices. In this paper, we systematically review the white and grey literature on the topic, in order to identify the most recognised architectural smells for microservices and to discuss the architectural refactorings allowing to resolve them.
The microservice architectural style has many advantages such as scalability, reusability, and easy maintainability. Microservices have therefore become a popular architectural choice when developing new applications. Reaping these benefits requires redesigning the monolithic application and moving them to a microservices-based architecture. This process is inherently complex and costly, so automating this task is critical. This project proposes a method by which potential microservices can be identified from a given monolithic application while treating this problem as a clustering thematic. …
Context: Several companies are migrating their information systems into the Cloud. Microservices and DevOps are two of the most common adopted technologies. However, there is still a lack of understanding how to adopt a microservice-based architectural style and which tools and technique to use in a continuous architecting pipeline. Objective: We aim at characterizing the different microservice architectural style principles and patterns in order to map existing tools and techniques adopted in the context of DevOps. Methodology: We conducted a Systematic Mapping Study identifying the goal and …
Microservices based architectures are based on a set of modular, independent and fault-tolerant services. In recent years, the software engineering community presented studies investigating potential, recurrent, effective architectural patterns in microservices-based architectures, as they are very essential to maintain and scale microservice-based systems. Indeed, the organizational structure of such systems should be reflected in so-called microservice architecture patterns, that best fit the projects and development teams needs. However, there is a lack of public repositories sharing open s…
Cloud applications are more and more microservice-oriented, but a concrete charting of the microservices architecture landscape -- namely, the space of technical options available for microservice software architects in their decision-making -- is still very much lacking, thereby limiting the ability of software architects to properly evaluate their architectural decisions with sound experiential devices and/or practical design principles. On the one hand, Microservices are fine-grained, loosely coupled services that communicate through lightweight protocols. On the other hand, each microservi…
While Microservices promise several beneficial characteristics for sustainable long-term software evolution, little empirical research covers what concrete activities industry applies for the evolvability assurance of Microservices and how technical debt is handled in such systems. Since insights into the current state of practice are very important for researchers, we performed a qualitative interview study to explore applied evolvability assurance processes, the usage of tools, metrics, and patterns, as well as participants' reflections on the topic. In 17 semi-structured interviews, we disc…
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.
Microservice Architecture (MSA) denotes an emerging architectural style for distributed and service-based systems whereby each microservice is highly cohesive and implements a single business capability. A microservice system consists of multiple, loosely coupled microservices. It provides complex capabilities through services interacting in choreographies. A single dedicated team, typically practicing DevOps, is responsible for each microservice, i.e., it "owns" the service. However, while systems relying on MSA have several architectural advantages especially for cloud applications, their re…
Software engineers share their architectural knowledge (AK) in different places on the Web. Recent studies show that architectural blogs contain the most relevant AK, which can help software engineers to make design steps. Nevertheless, we know little about blogs, and specifically architectural blogs, where software engineers share their AK. In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study on architectural blogs to explore their types, topics, and their AK. Moreover, we determine the relevance of architectural blogs to make design steps. Our results support researchers and practitioners to find …
The move towards the microservice based architecture is well underway. In this architectural style, small and loosely coupled modules are developed, deployed, and scaled independently to compose cloud-native applications. However, for carrier-grade service providers to migrate to the microservices architectural style, availability remains a concern. Kubernetes is an open source platform that defines a set of building blocks which collectively provide mechanisms for deploying, maintaining, scaling, and healing containerized microservices. Thus, Kubernetes hides the complexity of microservice or…
Electronic Health Record Systems (EHR-S) are commonly developed in monolithic architectures. This architectural style presents greater complexity and demands more effort when we think of interoperability. A solution proposal is the creation of Microservices that use HL7 FHIR as an interoperability strategy. In this sense, it is presented the development of a prototype, based on a microservices architecture, to act in a real scenario of Patient Navigation (PN). The problem was subdivided into 3 steps: definition of architecture, development and construction of an interface to simulate the role …
Software developers use issue trackers (e.g. Jira) to manage defects, bugs, tasks, change requests, etc. In this paper we explore (a) how architectural knowledge concepts (e.g. architectural component behavior, contextual constraints) are textually represented in issues (e.g. as adjectives), (b) which architectural knowledge concepts commonly occur in issues, and (c) which architectural knowledge concepts appear together. We analyzed issues in the Jira issue trackers of three large Apache projects. To identify ``architecturally relevant'' issues, we linked issues to architecturally relevant so…
Continuous Architecture (CA) is an approach that supports companies in decreasing the time between deliveries. Migration to microservices is one of the most common situations when companies adopt continuous architecting processes [4]. Companies commonly adopt an initial migration strategy to extract some components from the monolithic system as microservices, making use of simplified microservices patterns [5][4]. As an example, companies commonly directly connect the microservices to the legacy monolithic system and do not adopt any message bus at the beginning. When the system starts to grow…
Microservices become a fast growing and popular architectural style based on service-oriented development. One of the major advantages using component-based approaches is to support reuse. In this paper, we present a study of microservices and how these systems are related to the traditional abstract models of component-based systems. This research focuses on the core properties of microservices including their scalability, availability and resilience, consistency, coupling and cohesion, and data storage capability, while highlighting their limitations and challenges in relation to components.…
Today's customers are characterized by individual requirements that lead the manufacturing industry to increased product variety and volume reduction. Manufacturing systems and more specifically assembly systems (ASs) should allow quick adaptation of manufacturing assets so as to respond to the evolving market requirements that lead to mass customization. Meanwhile, the manufacturing era is changing due to the fourth industrial revolution, i.e., Industry 4.0, that will change the traditional manufacturing environment to an IoT-based one. In this context, this paper introduces the concept of cy…
While the recently emerged Microservices architectural style is widely discussed in literature, it is difficult to find clear guidance on the process of refactoring legacy applications. The importance of the topic is underpinned by high costs and effort of a refactoring process which has several other implications, e.g. overall processes (DevOps) and team structure. Software architects facing this challenge are in need of selecting an appropriate strategy and refactoring technique. One of the most discussed aspects in this context is finding the right service granularity to fully leverage the …
Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates vario…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Microservice Architecture (MSA) is an architectural style for service-based software systems. MSA puts a strong emphasis on high cohesion and loose coupling of the services that provide systems' functionalities. As a result of this, MSA-based software architectures exhibit increased scalability and extensibility, and facilitate the application of continuous integration techniques. This paper presents a case study of an MSA-based Remote Care Application (RCA) that allows caregivers to remotely access smart home devices. The goal of the RCA is to assist persons being cared in Activities of Daily…
The microservice architectural style has gained much attention from both academia and industry recently as a novel way to design, develop, and deploy cloud-native applications. This concept encourages the decomposition of a monolith into multiple independently deployable units. A typical microservices-based application is formed of two service types: functional services, which provide the core business logic, and infrastructure services, which provide essential functionalities for a microservices ecosystem. To improve developers' productivity, many software frameworks have been developed to pr…
The architectural style of microservices has been gaining popularity in recent years. In this architectural style, small and loosely coupled modules are deployed and scaled independently to compose cloud-native applications. Carrier-grade service providers are migrating their legacy applications to a microservice based architecture running on Kubernetes which is an open source platform for orchestrating containerized microservice based applications. However, in this migration, service availability remains a concern. Service availability is measured as the percentage of time the service is prov…
Microservice Architecture (MSA) is a novel service-based architectural style for distributed software systems. Compared to Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), MSA puts a stronger focus on self-containment of services. Each microservice is responsible for realizing exactly one business or technological capability that is distinct from other services' capabilities. Additionally, on the implementation and operation level, microservices are self-contained in that they are developed, tested, deployed and operated independently from each other. Next to these characteristics that distinguish MSA fro…
The promise of increased agility, autonomy, scalability, and reusability has made the microservices architecture a \textit{de facto} standard for the development of large-scale and cloud-native commercial applications. Software patterns are an important design tool, and often they are selected and combined with the goal of obtaining a set of desired quality attributes. However, from a research standpoint, many patterns have not been widely validated against industry practice, making them not much more than interesting theories. To address this, we investigated how practitioners perceive the im…
