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Architectural Languages for the Microservices Architecture: A systematic mapping study

Abstract:

The interest in the research on the architectural languages of microservices architecture has been increasing since 2015. This gives rise to new architectural language proposals to address different microservice-specific challenges. This diversity of architectural languages means that there is still no predominant architectural language. This mapping study aims to identify the architectural languages used in a microservices architecture by following a systematic methodology that covers the years from 2015 to 2021, and a research protocol was created to allow the study's reproducibility. We identified and analyzed studies that answered the research questions and applied data extraction guidelines and thematic synthesis to provide an overview of the microservices architectural languages. We found a total of 69 primary studies which propose architectural languages that were grouped in challenges of microservices architecture they address and architectural and design characteristics, which used base languages such as UML, BPMN, graphs, and others. Lastly, our findings show that there are several options to model microservice systems according to the challenges of this architectural style that they address.