Patterns Related to Microservice Architecture: a Multivocal Literature Review

Abstract

A Microservice Architecture enables the development of distributed systems using a set of highly cohesive, independent, and collaborative services, ready for current cloud computing demands. Each microservice can be implemented in different technologies, sharing common communication channels, which results in heterogeneous distributed systems that exhibit high scalability, maintainability, performance, and interoperability. Currently, there are many options to build microservices; some of them led by patterns that establish common structures to solve recurrent problems. Nevertheless, as microservices are an emerging trend, the relationship between quality attributes, metrics, and patterns is not clearly defined, which is a concern from a software engineering point of view, since such understanding is fundamental to correctly design systems using this architecture. This paper aims to extend the knowledge on the design of microservices-based systems by presenting a multivocal systematic literature review for microservices related patterns, tying them together with quality attributes and metrics, as can be found in academic and industry research.