Network Centrality as a New Perspective on Microservice Architecture
Alexander Bakhtin, Matteo Esposito, Valentina Lenarduzzi, Davide Taibi

TL;DR
This paper explores the use of network centrality metrics to analyze microservice architectures, revealing their potential to identify anti-patterns and complement traditional software metrics.
Contribution
It introduces the application of graph centrality metrics to microservice architecture analysis, providing new insights beyond conventional software metrics.
Findings
Weak to moderate correlation between metrics in 282 cases
Centrality metrics can help detect architectural anti-patterns
Subgraph centrality requires further research for practical use
Abstract
Context: Over the past decade, the adoption of Microservice Architecture (MSA) has led to the identification of various patterns and anti-patterns, such as Nano/Mega/Hub services. Detecting these anti-patterns often involves modeling the system as a Service Dependency Graph (SDG) and applying graph-theoretic approaches. Aim: While previous research has explored software metrics (SMs) such as size, complexity, and quality for assessing MSAs, the potential of graph-specific metrics like network centrality remains largely unexplored. This study investigates whether centrality metrics (CMs) can provide new insights into MSA quality and facilitate the detection of architectural anti-patterns, complementing or extending traditional SMs. Method: We analyzed 24 open-source MSA projects, reconstructing their architectures to study 53 microservices. We measured SMs and CMs for each microservice…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware System Performance and Reliability · Software-Defined Networks and 5G · Cloud Computing and Resource Management
