Visualizing Anti-Patterns in Microservices at Runtime: A Systematic Mapping Study
Garrett Parker, Samuel Kim, Abdullah Al Maruf, Tomas Cerny, Karel Frajták, Pavel Tisnovsky, Davide Taibi
Abstract
In the world of microservices, companies must be able to create systems that operate in the most efficient way. To achieve this, anti-patterns must be avoided because of their detriment to the quality of the system. Some of the most troubling anti-patterns are hard to detect because of their appearance at runtime. Effectively removing anti-patterns from a system requires dynamic analysis because of the large size of microservice-based systems. While the detection of anti-patterns is helpful, being able to visualize them offers a great benefit to companies working with microservices. Seeing how the overall system is flowing and recognizing the existence of anti-patterns can help improve microservice-based systems. In this paper, a systematic mapping study was performed to find the current state of research on visualizing anti-patterns in microservices from the dynamic perspective. Several hundred papers were examined and a total of 31 were found to be relevant to the research topic. The papers, when analyzed, revealed that there are mechanisms to detect anti-patterns at runtime in microservices, and there are also mechanisms for visualizing the architecture of a microservice-based system. This study’s findings could help to identify and remove anti-patterns that occur during runtime in microservices, as well as a means of visualizing these anti-patterns.