Discussing Microservices: Definitions, Pitfalls, and their Relations

Abstract

During the last years, a growing amount of industry areas started to use microservices. Microservices offer advantages like scalability and independent service realization, but also pitfall. We noticed inconsistencies between the different existing definitions of the term microservice and practical implementations of microservice based systems. Therefore, we evaluate existing microservice-definitions and analyze the coherence of identified pitfalls to the definitions. Thereby, we observed that many pitfalls are related to imprecise definitions. With a new, distinct, and explicit definition of microservices as slice service style, we can avoid most pitfalls - the definition is given as architectural style with demand to tailor the software process model. Furthermore, we discuss pitfalls of microservices that the definition cannot avoid.