A curated Dataset of Microservices-Based Systems
This provides a resource for researchers and educators in software engineering to study and compare microservices patterns, though it is incremental as it focuses on data collection rather than new methods.
The paper addresses the lack of public repositories for microservices architectural patterns by creating a curated dataset of 20 open-source projects, including information on inter-service dependencies and analyzed using tools like SLOCcount and MicroDepGraph.
Microservices based architectures are based on a set of modular, independent and fault-tolerant services. In recent years, the software engineering community presented studies investigating potential, recurrent, effective architectural patterns in microservices-based architectures, as they are very essential to maintain and scale microservice-based systems. Indeed, the organizational structure of such systems should be reflected in so-called microservice architecture patterns, that best fit the projects and development teams needs. However, there is a lack of public repositories sharing open sources projects microservices patterns and practices, which could be beneficial for teaching purposes and future research investigations. This paper tries to fill this gap, by sharing a dataset, having a first curated list microservice-based projects. Specifically, the dataset is composed of 20 open-source projects, all using specific microservice architecture patterns. Moreover, the dataset also reports information about inter-service calls or dependencies of the aforementioned projects. For the analysis, we used two different tools (1) SLOCcount and (2) MicroDepGraph to get different parameters for the microservice dataset. Both the microservice dataset and analysis tool are publicly available online. We believe that this dataset will be highly used by the research community for understanding more about microservices architectural and dependencies patterns, enabling researchers to compare results on common projects.