Architecting Microservices: Practical Opportunities and Challenges

Contemporary highly dynamic technology and business environments, coupled with digitally savvy customers, are forcing both private and public organizations to continuously innovate and update their Information and Communication Technology (ICT) service offerings. In order to decrease the development cycles and ensure continuous delivery, many organizations are adopting new practices aimed at unifying software development and operations (i.e., DevOps). However, monolithic architectures of many large systems underpinning ICT services are severely restricting the effectiveness of such efforts. Although the latest architectural trend, microservices, is promising to solve many of the problems associated with monolithic software architectures, there is significant disagreement on when microservice architecture should be adopted, as well as how it may be best implemented. Given the limited empirical research on the topic, this paper identifies and discusses a range of opportunities and challenges associated with the adoption and implementation of microservices. The findings presented in the paper have been derived from in-depth interviews with 19 ICT architects with significant experience in large corporate systems, middleware, service oriented architectures, and, to a somewhat more limited extent, microservices.