Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in so ware industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. e transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for be er alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. e study aims to provide a be er understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working de nition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as rst-class entities. is study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. is study identi es opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.CCS Concepts: •General and reference → Surveys and overviews; •So ware and its engineering → Extra-functional properties; Designing so ware; So ware design tradeo s; Abstraction, modeling and modularity; So ware design engineering; Agile so ware development; Publish-subscribe / event-based architectures; Model-driven so ware engineering; Ultra-large-scale systems; Rapid application development; Design pa erns;