Microservices in Industry: Insights into Technologies, Characteristics, and Software Quality

Bogner, Justus; Fritzsch, Jonas; Wagner, Stefan; Zimmermann, Alfred

doi:10.1109/icsa-c.2019.00041

Cited by 69 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Despite its potential for positively impacting the aforementioned features of a software architecture and its implementation, MSA also introduces complexity both to development processes and operation [17,73,79]. Consequently, practitioners in SMOs perceive the successful adoption of MSA as complex [9]. Challenges that must be addressed in MSA adoption are spread across all stages in the engineering process, and thus concern the design of the architecture, its development and operation.…”

Section: Generalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Too fine-grained microservices, on the other hand, may require an inefficiently high amount of communication and thus network traffic at runtime [46]. Although there exist approaches such as Domain-driven Design (DDD) [26] to support in the systematic decomposition and granularity determination of a microservice architecture [54], their perceived complexity hampers widespread adoption in practice [9,28].…”

Section: Design Stagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The adoption of MSA is expected to increase an application's scalability, maintainability, and reliability [54]. It is frequently employed to decompose monolithic applications for which such quality attributes are of critical scale [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Applying Model-Driven Engineering to Stimulate the Adoption of DevOps Processes in Small and Medium-Sized Development Organizations

et al. 2021

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Microservice architecture (MSA) denotes an increasingly popular architectural style in which business capabilities are wrapped into autonomously developable and deployable software components called microservices. Microservice applications are developed by multiple DevOps teams each owning one or more services. In this article, we explore the state of how DevOps teams in small and medium-sized organizations (SMOs) cope with MSA and how they can be supported. We show through a secondary analysis of an exploratory interview study comprising six cases, that the organizational and technological complexity resulting from MSA poses particular challenges for small and medium-sized organizations (SMOs). We apply model-driven engineering to address these challenges. As results of the second analysis, we identify the challenge areas of building and maintaining a common architectural understanding, and dealing with deployment technologies. To support DevOps teams of SMOs in coping with these challenges, we present a model-driven workflow based on LEMMA—the Language Ecosystem for Modeling Microservice Architecture. To implement the workflow, we extend LEMMA with the functionality to (i) generate models from API documentation; (ii) reference remote models owned by other teams; (iii) generate deployment specifications; and (iv) generate a visual representation of the overall architecture. We validate the model-driven workflow and our extensions to LEMMA through a case study showing that the added functionality to LEMMA can bring efficiency gains for DevOps teams. To develop best practices for applying our workflow to maximize efficiency in SMOs, we plan to conduct more empirical research in the field in the future.

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Section: Generalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Design Stagementioning

confidence: 99%

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Applying Model-Driven Engineering to Stimulate the Adoption of DevOps Processes in Small and Medium-Sized Development Organizations

et al. 2021

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“…Bogner et al [12] interviewed with an expert from 10 different companies based on Germany; some of these companies have been active in Europe or even globally. The discussion covered three main aspects, the technology that used to implement the microservices, the popular features that play a significant role to adopt a microservice architecture and the impact of the microservice on different software quality attribute.…”

Section: Evolution Into Microservices Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

Reviving Legacy Enterprise Systems with Micro service-Based Architecture with in Cloud Environments

Habibullah¹,

Liu²,

Tan³

et al. 2019

8th International Conference on Soft Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Applications

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Evolution has always been a challenge for enterprise computing systems. The microservice based architecture is a new design model which is rapidly becoming one of the most effective means to re-architect legacy enterprise systems and to reengineer them into new modern systems at a relatively low cost. This architectural style has evolved based on a number of different approaches and standards. However, there are quite a few technical challenges which emerge when adopting microservices to revive a legacy enterprise system. In this paper, an evolution framework and a set of feature-driven microservices-oriented evolution rules have been proposed and applied to modernise legacy enterprise systems, with a special emphasis on analysing the implications as regards runtime performance, scalability, maintainability and testability. Testing and evaluation have been carried out in depth, aiming to provide a guidance for the evolution of legacy enterprise systems.

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“…The interview results related to the evolvability assurance of microservices have already been discussed on their own in (Bogner et al 2019a). Since the extensive interviews also covered additional topics, there are also publications on used technologies, the adherence to microservice characteristics, and overall software quality (Bogner et al 2019b) as well as on intentions, strategies, and challenges for migrating to microservices (Fritzsch et al 2019a). This article therefore extends our previous work (Bogner et al 2019a) with a grey literature review and the joint interpretation of interview and GLR results.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industry practices and challenges for the evolvability assurance of microservices

et al. 2021

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Context Microservices as a lightweight and decentralized architectural style with fine-grained services promise several beneficial characteristics for sustainable long-term software evolution. Success stories from early adopters like Netflix, Amazon, or Spotify have demonstrated that it is possible to achieve a high degree of flexibility and evolvability with these systems. However, the described advantageous characteristics offer no concrete guidance and little is known about evolvability assurance processes for microservices in industry as well as challenges in this area. Insights into the current state of practice are a very important prerequisite for relevant research in this field. Objective We therefore wanted to explore how practitioners structure the evolvability assurance processes for microservices, what tools, metrics, and patterns they use, and what challenges they perceive for the evolvability of their systems. Method We first conducted 17 semi-structured interviews and discussed 14 different microservice-based systems and their assurance processes with software professionals from 10 companies. Afterwards, we performed a systematic grey literature review (GLR) and used the created interview coding system to analyze 295 practitioner online resources. Results The combined analysis revealed the importance of finding a sensible balance between decentralization and standardization. Guidelines like architectural principles were seen as valuable to ensure a base consistency for evolvability and specialized test automation was a prevalent theme. Source code quality was the primary target for the usage of tools and metrics for our interview participants, while testing tools and productivity metrics were the focus of our GLR resources. In both studies, practitioners did not mention architectural or service-oriented tools and metrics, even though the most crucial challenges like Service Cutting or Microservices Integration were of an architectural nature. Conclusions Practitioners relied on guidelines, standardization, or patterns like Event-Driven Messaging to partially address some reported evolvability challenges. However, specialized techniques, tools, and metrics are needed to support industry with the continuous evaluation of service granularity and dependencies. Future microservices research in the areas of maintenance, evolution, and technical debt should take our findings and the reported industry sentiments into account.

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Microservices in Industry: Insights into Technologies, Characteristics, and Software Quality

Cited by 69 publications

References 12 publications

Applying Model-Driven Engineering to Stimulate the Adoption of DevOps Processes in Small and Medium-Sized Development Organizations

Applying Model-Driven Engineering to Stimulate the Adoption of DevOps Processes in Small and Medium-Sized Development Organizations

Reviving Legacy Enterprise Systems with Micro service-Based Architecture with in Cloud Environments

Industry practices and challenges for the evolvability assurance of microservices

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