On the Study of Microservices Antipatterns

Abstract

Microservice architecture has become popular in the last few years as it allows the development of independent, highly reusable, and fine grained services. However, a lack of understanding of its core concepts and the absence of a ground-truth lead to design and implementation decisions, which might be applied often and introduce poorly designed solutions, called antipatterns. The definition of microservice antipatterns is essential for improving the design, maintenance, and evolution of microservice-based systems. Moreover, the few existing specifications and definitions of microservice antipatterns are scattered in the literature. Consequently, we conducted a systematic literature review of 27 papers related to microservices and analyzed 67 open-source microservice-based systems. Based on our analysis, we report in this paper 16 microservice antipatterns. We concisely describe these antipatterns, how they are implemented, and suggest refactoring solutions to remove them.