1.
Research on Architecting Microservices:
Trends, Focus, and Potential for Industrial Adoption
*paolo.difrancesco@gssi.it
‡{p.lago, i.malavolta}@vu.nl
Paolo Di Francesco*, Patricia Lago‡, Ivano Malavolta‡

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Paolo Di Francesco
Roadmap
• Microservice Architectures (MSAs)
• Study Design
• Results
• Conclusions
Roadmap

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Paolo Di Francesco
Microservice architectures
MSA is an architectural style inspired by service-oriented computing
• Small services
• Running in own process
• Lightweight communication
Introduction

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Paolo Di Francesco
Microservice architectures
• Products not Projects
• Cross-functional teams
• Infrastructure automation
• Intelligence in the endpoints
• Decentralized governance of
• Language
• Data
Introduction
Delivery Pipelines
Teams Capabilities

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Paolo Di Francesco
Problem
Difficult to have a clear view of existing research solutions for
architecting microservices
Introduction
978-1-5090-2246-5/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
Leveraging microservices architecture by usingDocker technology
David JaramilloCloud Engineering and Services
IBM
Boca Raton, FL, USA
djaramil@us.ibm.com
Duy V Nguyen
Cloud Engineering and Services
IBM
Boca Raton, FL, USA
dnguyenv@us.ibm.com
Robert Smart
Emerging Technologies
IBM
Hursley, United Kingdomsmartrob@uk.ibm.com
Abstract— Microservices architecture is not a hype and for
awhile, started getting attention from organizations who want to
shorten time to market of a software product by improving
productivity effect through maximizing the automation in all life
circle of the product. However, microservices architecture
approach also introduces a lot of new complexity and requires
application developers a certain level of maturity in order to
confidently apply the architectural style. Docker has been a
disruptive technology which changes the way applications are
being developed and distributed. With a lot of advantages,
Docker is a very good fit to implementing microservices
architecture. In this paper we will discuss about how Docker can
effectively help in leveraging mircoservices architecture with a
real working model as a case study.
Keywords—micoservices; docker; devops; automation
I. INTRODUCTIONA common way to build software applications until now is
the monolithic approach where one deployment unit has
several responsibilities and in some cases it does mostly
everything. Monolithic approach is still good for small scale
teams and projects, but when scalability, flexibility and other
requirements like fast development, short time to market, wider
team collaboration, and so on become more and more critical
to achieve business competitiveness, monolithic starts
becoming a big barrier.
It’s much harder to make changes to the application in
responding to radical change requirements from users or
business model frequently, as the code base becomes bigger,
more complicated with more people making changes to it. The
tightly coupled model of monolithic approach natually requires
incremental amount of effort to coordinate to make any must-
have updates which consequently slows down the release cycle
of the application as well as contributes further to its fragility
Microservices architectural approach was introduced as a
solution to solve the monolithic problem. Even though it’s in
theory supposed to address most of the problems occured in
mononithic approach, but Microservices also has a long
downsides list which emphasizes the requirement to have a
certain level of maturity in automation and agility for the
developers to be able to make use of it’s advantages.
Containerization technologies where Docker is leading is really
accelerating the application of microservices architecture in a
lot of use cases.
II. MICROSERVICES ARCHITECTUREMicroservices are small autonomous services that work
together to fulfill a business requirement. This section will
discuss about some basic concepts and characteristics in
micoservice architecture.
A. Small and focussed
Even though “small” is not a very good measure to describe
microservices but we can use it as an attempt to emphasize
one of the most important characteristics of microservices that
is each service is fine-grained, high cohesion to focus on
fulfilling a granular responsibility.
In the enterprise context, microservices should be designed
with business oriented driver in mind. That means the resulting
services should not mimic organization, technological or
communication boundaries. In stead, they should be modelled
around specific business domain.
From development perspective, each service should be
treated as an independant application with its own source code
repository and delivery pipeline.
B. Loosly coupled
Loose coupling is an essential characteristic of
microservices. Each microservice needs to be deployed as

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Paolo Di Francesco
Solution
SYSTEMATIC MAPPING STUDY
• Unbiased
• Objective
• Systematic
• Answer a set of research questions by analysing all relevant
research contributions
Introduction

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Paolo Di Francesco
Systematic mapping study
• RQ1: What are the publication trends of research studies about
architecting microservices?
• RQ2: What is the focus of research on architecting
microservices?
• RQ3: What is the potential for industrial adoption of existing
research on architecting microservices?
Systematic Mapping Study

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Paolo Di Francesco
Systematic mapping study
Systematic Mapping Study
342 297
(architect* OR design* OR system OR structur*) AND (microservi* OR
micro-servi* OR "micro servi"*)

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Paolo Di Francesco
Systematic mapping study
RQ1: What are the publication trends of research studies?
• Scientific interest, venues, and contribution types
RQ2: What is the focus of research?
• Understanding of current research gaps
• Classification framework
RQ3: What is the potential for industrial adoption of existing
research?
• Are we ready to be transferred to industry?
Systematic Mapping Study

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ1 – Publication trends
Finding: Publication venues are scattered across specific topics or
application domains
Publication Trends

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ1 – Publication trends
Gap: Industry-oriented studies are not yet in the focus of researchers
Publication Trends
3
3
8
8
14
48
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Evaluation research
Philosophical paper
Experience paper
Opinion paper
Validation research
Solution proposal
I - Research Strategy

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Paolo Di Francesco
Systematic mapping study
RQ1: What are the publication trends of research studies?
• Scientific interest, venues, and contribution types
RQ2: What is the focus of research?
• Understanding of current research gaps
• Classification framework
RQ3: What is the potential for industrial adoption of existing
research?
• Are we ready to be transferred to industry?
Systematic Mapping Study

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ2 – Research Focus
1. Research Scope
• Information to put a research study into context
• Target problems, research perspective, software lifecycle
2. Support for architecting
• Architecting activities, quality attributes, architectural patterns,
infrastructure services
Research Focus

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ2 – Research Focus (Scope)
• Finding: Tradeoff between flexibility and complexity
• Gap: System level qualities not yet fully investigated
Research Focus
4
4
4
5
5
7
7
11
13
15
16
19
19
0 5 10 15 20
Time to market
Security
Realtime communication
Low testability
Low portability
Runtime uncertainty
Low auditability
Modernization
Data management
Service composition
Resources management
Low flexibility
Complexity
II - Target Problems

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ2 – Research Focus (Scope)
• Key enablers: Containerization and Virtualization
• Researchers are investigating how to leverage system quality
• Finding: Focus on legacy migration
Research Focus
10
6
6
11
16
21
21
0 5 10 15 20 25
Other
Mobile oriented
IoT
Domain-specific
Migration
System quality
Cloud
IV - Research Perspective

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ2 – Research Focus (Scope)
• Cross-cutting domains of application
• Finding: Focus on cloud and mobile
Research Focus
10
6
6
11
16
21
21
0 5 10 15 20 25
Other
Mobile oriented
IoT
Domain-specific
Migration
System quality
Cloud
IV - Research Perspective

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ2 – Research Focus (Scope)
• Gap: Maintenance and testing are not primary targets
• Finding: Most studies cover design, but one addresses requirements
Research Focus
1
10
12
22
24
65
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Requirements
Testing
Maintenance
Operation
Implementation
Design
VI - SW Lifecycle Scope

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ2 – Research Focus (Support for Architecting)
• Little focus on architectural reuse, maintenance and evolution, impact
analysis and recovery
• Low interest in extrovert architecting activities
Research Focus
0
4
2
5
6
6
10
15
18
23
29
56
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Getting Input
Providing Information
A. Impact Analysis
A. Recovery
A. Synthesis
A. Reuse
A. Understanding
A. Mainten. and Evo
A. Evaluation
A. Description
A. Implementation
A. Analysis
VII - Architecting Activities

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RQ2 – Research Focus (Support for Architecting)
Gap: Not equal attention to every quality attributes
Research Focus
12
13
14
14
14
17
28
40
0 10 20 30 40 50
Portability
Usability
Compatibility
Reliability
Functional suitability
Security
Maintainability
Performance efficiency
VIII - Quality Attributes

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ2 – Research Focus (Support for Architecting)
Set of infrastructure services supporting non-functional tasks
Finding: This focus will help devising new patterns and styles for further
leveraging cloud-based architectural models
Research Focus
1
4
6
6
10
13
26
26
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Data storage
Service Proxies
Security
Messaging
Service brokering
Service Orchestration
System level management
Monitoring
XI - Infrastructure Services

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21Di Francesco, Lago, Malavolta
Paolo Di Francesco
Systematic mapping study
RQ1: What are the publication trends of research studies?
• Scientific interest, venues, and contribution types
RQ2: What is the focus of research?
• Understanding of current research gaps
• Classification framework
RQ3: What is the potential for industrial adoption of existing
research?
• Are we ready to be transferred to industry?
Systematic Mapping Study

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ3 – Potential for Industrial Adoption
Technology Readiness Level
Technology is either formulated, validated or demonstrated
• At most in lab TRL ≤ 4
• In relevant environment 5 ≤ TRL ≤ 6
• In operational environments TRL ≥ 7
Potential for Industrial Adoption

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Paolo Di Francesco
RQ3 – Potential for Industrial Adoption
Industry Involvement
Potential for Industrial Adoption

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Paolo Di Francesco
Conclusions
http://cs.gssi.infn.it/ICSA2017ReplicationPackage
Conclusions