Breaking Down Barriers: Building Sustainable Microservices Architectures with Model-Driven Engineering

Despite their promise of circularity and optimized resource consumption, the concrete achievement of sustainability through Microservices Architecture (MSA) faces challenges. Numerous intricate factors can negatively influence MSAs' design and implementation, compromising their economic and environmental effectiveness. We advocate for adopting standard and shared modeling practices to address these challenges. In this paper, we initiate an open discussion on the root causes of these challenges, relating them to the foundational microservices tenets of independence and autonomy. We also propose directions for researchers and practitioners to expand theoretical and practical knowledge of achieving sustainable microservices architectures through model-driven engineering (MDE).