Assessment of performance and its scalability in microservice architectures: Systematic literature review

The microservice architecture structures an application as a collection of small autonomous services, enhancing development practices and maintainability. It impacts system performance and scalability, which are influenced by the architectural design, the system deployment, and usage. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review (SLR) on the assessment of performance and scalability in the microservice architecture, aiming to identify research gaps and assess the current state of knowledge. The review protocol screened 801 studies, selecting 29 primary studies for detailed analysis. We perform comparisons of studies and try to identify the main gaps in current research and suggest areas for further investigation. The main conclusion is that the current research partially addresses the dimensions associated with the performance and scalability qualities of microservice systems. In particular, there is a lack of comparative studies of architectural patterns and styles or comparable assessment models and methods. Therefore, a systematic approach is lacking and the paper reports a set of open research trends to guide researchers in the area of microservice-based software architecture quality assessment. • The paper answers the following research question: How does current research on microservice architectures, performance, and scalability address the architectural dimensions used in end-to-end scalability assessment? • We performed a systematic literature review on the performance and scalability assessment of microservice architectures, where we screened 801 studies to select 29 primary studies that were used to provide an overview of the state of the art. • We introduced a systematic framework for the analysis of performance and scalability assessment methodologies, and analyzed the 29 primary studies according to this analysis framework. • We conclude that current research mainly focuses on some of the dimensions of the microservice architecture, namely the aspects associated with deployment architectures. In addition, it is difficult to compare the different studies because they address different aspects of the dimensions. • We report a set of open research trends to guide researchers in the area of microservice-based software architecture quality assessment.