On the Nature of Issues in Five Open Source Microservices Systems: An Empirical Study

TL;DR

This empirical study analyzes 1,345 issues from five open source microservices systems to classify issue types, causes, and their implications for improving microservices development and maintenance.

Contribution

It presents the first taxonomy of issues in open source microservices, linking issues to underlying causes like technical debt, security, and configuration problems.

Findings

Technical debt issues are most common (23.86%).

Security-related issues account for 10.18%.

Configuration and legacy issues are significant causes.

Abstract

Due to its enormous benefits, the research and industry communities have shown an increasing interest in the Microservices Architecture (MSA) style over the last few years. Despite this, there is a limited evidence-based and thorough understanding of the types of issues (e.g., faults, errors, failures, mistakes) faced by microservices system developers and causes that trigger the issues. Such evidence-based understanding of issues and causes is vital for long-term, impactful, and quality research and practice in the MSA style. To that end, we conducted an empirical study on 1,345 issue discussions extracted from five open source microservices systems hosted on GitHub. Our analysis led to the first of its kind taxonomy of the types of issues in open source microservices systems, informing that the problems originating from Technical debt (321, 23.86%), Build (145, 10.78%), Security (137, 10.18%), and Service execution and communication (119, 8.84%) are prominent. We identified that "General programming errors", "Poor security management", "Invalid configuration and communication", and "Legacy versions, compatibility and dependency" are the predominant causes for the leading four issue categories. Study results streamline a taxonomy of issues, their mapping with underlying causes, and present empirical findings that could facilitate research and development on emerging and next-generation microservices systems.