Understanding the Issues, Their Causes and Solutions in Microservices Systems: An Empirical Study

Understand

Many small to large organizations have adopted the Microservices Architecture (MSA) style to develop and deliver their core businesses.

• Despite the popularity of MSA in the software industry, there is a limited evidence-based and thorough understanding of the types of issues (e.g., errors, faults, failures, and bugs) that microservices system developers experience, the causes of the issues, and the solutions as potential fixing strategies to address the issues.
• To ameliorate this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods empirical study that collected data from 2,641 issues from the issue tracking systems of 15 open-source microservices systems on GitHub, 15 interviews, and an online survey completed by 150 practitioners from 42 countries across 6 continents.
• Our analysis led to comprehensive taxonomies for the issues, causes, and solutions.