Microservices are becoming the de-facto standard way for software development in the cloud and in service-oriented computing. Service meshes have been introduced as a dedicated infrastructure for managing a network of containerized microservices, in order to cope with the complexity, manageability, and interoperability challenges in especially large-scale microservice architectures. Unfortunately so far no dedicated architecture guidance for designing microservices and choosing among technology options in a service mesh exist. As a result, there is a substantial uncertainty in designing and using microservices in a service mesh environment today. To alleviate this problem, we have performed a model-based qualitative in-depth study of existing practices in this field in which we have systematically and in-depth studied 40 reports of established practices from practitioners. In our study we modeled our findings in a rigorously specified reusable architectural decision model, in which we identified 14 architectural design decisions with 47 decision outcomes and 77 decision drivers in total. We estimated the uncertainty in the resulting design space with and without use of our model, and found that a substantial uncertainty reduction can be potentially achieved by applying our model.

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