Assessment of Performance and its Scalability in Microservice Architectures: Systematic Literature Review

05/19/2025

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.

Authors in the community:

• 

  A

  António Manuel Ferreira Rito da Silva

  ist12628

  Affiliations and sources

  IST > INESC-ID

  Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores: Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa

  IST > DEI

  Departamento de Engenharia Informática

AM - Accepted manuscript

Elsevier

Journal of Systems & Software

computer-and-information-sciences - Computer and information sciences

Keywords

• Microservice Architecture
• Performance
• Scalability
• Quality Assessment
• Systematic Literature Review

eng - English