Straddling the crevasse: A review of microservice software architecture foundations and recent advancements

Abstract

Microservice architecture style has been gaining wide impetus in the software engineering industry. Researchers and practitioners have adopted the microservices concepts into several application domains such as the internet of things, cloud computing, service computing, and healthcare. Applications developed in alignment with the microservices principles require an underlying platform with management capabilities to coordinate the different microservice units and ensure that the application functionalities are delivered to the user. A multitude of approaches has been proposed for the various tasks in microservices-based systems. However, since the field is relatively young, there is a need to organize the different research works. In this study, we present a comprehensive review of the research approaches directed toward microservice architectures and propose a multilevel taxonomy to categorize the existing research. The study also discusses the different distributed computing paradigms employing microservices and identifies the open research challenges in the domain. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.