Macro Architecture for Microservices: Improving Internal Quality of Microservice Systems

Microservices have established themselves as a common software engineering pattern for large-scale systems. However, while the focus of the approach on maximum flexibility for development of individual services has increased software development efficiency, the inter-service architecture of microservice-based systems has received little attention, resulting in systems with a multitude of confounding and poorly planned interactions between services, impeding initial development, maintenance and continued development of applications. This paper identifies three areas that currently require improvement in order to address the global architectural challenges of microservice systems. Furthermore, a solution is proposed for each of the areas with an implementation demonstrating how the proposed solution can improve development efficiency for and internal quality of microservice systems.