Abstract

Microservices are an emerging trend for development of service-oriented software. This approach proposes to build each application as a collection of small services running on separate process and inter-communicating with lightweight mechanisms. Systematic development of microservices is hampered by the lack of a catalog of emerging recurrent architectural solutions (architectural patterns) and design decisions (architectural tactics). This article describes a systematic review of academic and industrial literature regarding architectural patterns and architectural tactics for microservices. The review yield 44 architectural patterns in academic sources and 74 in industrial ones, as well as a few architectural tactics originally proposed to address related problems. Most architectural patterns and tactics are associated to one of just five quality attributes: scalability, flexibility, testability, performance, and elasticity. Also, most microservices in academic (but not industrial) literature are related to DevOps and IoT. The findings lead to propose a new taxonomy of microservice architectural patterns.