The pains and gains of microservices revisited: An updated systematic grey literature review

Abstract

Microservice architecture has become an extremely popular way to build software systems. To effectively utilize this architecture, it is important to grasp the benefits as well as the drawbacks of the architecture. The most up to date information of these trade-offs is in the industry, with the practitioners that are building commercial microservice systems. In this thesis we aim to find out the current pains and gains of microservices experienced by practitioners and their evolution in recent years. Soldani et al. have done a systematic grey literature review on this topic in 2018 titled "The pains and gains of microservices". To gather the currently relevant pains and gains of practitioners and to allow comparisons to the review by Soldani et al., we employ an updated systematic grey literature review on the topic. The review consists of 131 grey literature papers published since the original review, which were analyzed for their mentioned pains and gains of microservices. As a result of the study, we find that the most common causes for pains in microservices are caused by the increased complexity of microservice architectures. Additional pain points included difficulty in creating appropriate service boundaries, and the decreased performance in microservice systems. The most recognized microservice gains were the fault tolerance, flexibility, technology freedom, independent deployment, and scalability of microservices. The comparison to the original review revealed that pains related to the context of microservice storage are not as recognized as they were in earlier years, while the pains in microservice development saw a dramatic rise from the original review. For microservice gains the benefits related to microservice design patterns and storage have become less significant, while the gains related to microservice development, such as development agility and technology freedom between services, are more relevant than they were in the original review