Designing Microservice Systems Using Patterns: An Empirical Study on Quality Trade-Offs

TL;DR

This study investigates how industry practitioners perceive the impact of 14 microservice design patterns on quality attributes, revealing validated trade-offs and new insights into pattern benefits and challenges.

Contribution

It provides empirical validation of microservice patterns' impact on quality attributes through industry interviews, highlighting both known and novel trade-offs.

Findings

Many reported trade-offs align with pattern documentation.

Identified new gains and pains not previously documented.

Enhanced understanding of pattern impacts in real-world microservice systems.

Abstract

The promise of increased agility, autonomy, scalability, and reusability has made the microservices architecture a \textit{de facto} standard for the development of large-scale and cloud-native commercial applications. Software patterns are an important design tool, and often they are selected and combined with the goal of obtaining a set of desired quality attributes. However, from a research standpoint, many patterns have not been widely validated against industry practice, making them not much more than interesting theories. To address this, we investigated how practitioners perceive the impact of 14 patterns on 7 quality attributes. Hence, we conducted 9 semi-structured interviews to collect industry expertise regarding (1) knowledge and adoption of software patterns, (2) the perceived architectural trade-offs of patterns, and (3) metrics professionals use to measure quality attributes. We found that many of the trade-offs reported in our study matched the documentation of each respective pattern, and identified several gains and pains which have not yet been reported, leading to novel insight about microservice patterns.