Microservices Anti Patterns: A Taxonomy

Abstract: Several companies are re-architecting their monolithic information systems with microservices. However, many companies migrated without experience on microservices, mainly learning how to migrate from books or from practitioners' blogs. Because of the novelty of the topic, practitioners and consultancy are learning by doing how to migrate, thus facing several issues but also several benefits. In this chapter, we introduce a catalog and a taxonomy of the most common microservices anti-patterns in order to identify common problems. Our anti-pattern catalogue is based on the experience summarized by different practitioners we interviewed in the last three years. We identified a taxonomy of 20 anti-patterns, including organizational (team oriented and technology/tool oriented) anti-patterns and technical (internal and communication) anti-patterns. The results can be useful to practitioners to avoid experiencing the same difficult situations in the systems they develop. Moreover, researchers can benefit of this catalog and further validate the harmfulness of the anti-patterns identified.