NETE Review of Architectural Patterns and Tactics for Microservices in Academic and Industrial Literature
Gastón Lefranc · IEEE Latin America Transactions · 2018
Microservices are an emerging trend fordevelopment of service-oriented software. This approachproposes to build each application as a collection of small servicesrunning on separate process and inter-communicating withlightweight mechanisms. Systematic development ofmicroservices is hampered by the lack of a catalog of emergingrecurrent architectural solutions (architectural patterns) anddesign decisions (architectural tactics). This article describes asystematic review of academic and industrial literature regardingarchitectural patterns and architectural tactics for microservices.The review yield 44 architectural patterns in academic sourcesand 74 in industrial ones, as well as a few architectural tacticsoriginally proposed to address related problems. Mostarchitectural patterns and tactics are associated to one of just fivequality attributes: scalability, flexibility, testability, performance,and elasticity. Also, most microservices in academic (but notindustrial) literature are related to DevOps and IoT. The findingslead to propose a new taxonomy of microservice architecturalpatterns.