Metrics for Assessing Architecture Conformance to Microservice Architecture Patterns and Practices

Many contemporary service-based systems follow the microservice approach, particularly in DevOps or continuous delivery contexts. They share a set of important tenets such as independent development and deployment, high releasability, polyglot technology support, and loose coupling. A number of best practices for microservice architectures have been codified as patterns, which embody those tenets. However, no real-world microservices system can support all patterns and practices well, but rather architectural decisions making trade-offs among them are needed. Conformance to the patterns and practices selected in such decisions is hard to ensure and assess automatically, especially in large-scale, complex, and evolving systems. In this work, we propose a model-based approach based on generic, technology-independent metrics, tied to typical architectural design decisions in the microservice domain. With this approach we can measure conformance to the patterns and related tenets. We demonstrate and assess the validity and appropriateness of these metrics in performing an assessment of a system’s conformance to patterns through statistical methods.