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Microservices Anti-patterns: A Taxonomy

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Microservices

Abstract

Several companies are rearchitecting their monolithic information systems with microservices. However, many companies migrate to microservices without experience, mainly learning how to migrate from books or from practitioners’ blogs. Because of the novelty of the topic, practitioners and consultancies 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 catalog is based on the experience summarized by different practitioners we interviewed in the last 3 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 from this catalog and further validate the harmfulness of the anti-patterns identified.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

    Davide Taibi & Valentina Lenarduzzi

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Claus Pahl

Authors
  1. Davide Taibi
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  2. Valentina Lenarduzzi
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  3. Claus Pahl
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Davide Taibi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Distributed Adaptive Systems (DAS) Research Unit, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

    Antonio Bucchiarone

  2. Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Nicola Dragoni

  3. Distributed Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Schahram Dustdar

  4. Dept of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Patricia Lago

  5. Institute of Technologies and Software Development, Innopolis University, Innopolis, Russia

    Manuel Mazzara

  6. Institute of Technologies and Software Development, Innopolis University, Innopolis, Russia

    Victor Rivera

  7. Innopolis University, Innopolis, Russia

    Andrey Sadovykh

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Taibi, D., Lenarduzzi, V., Pahl, C. (2020). Microservices Anti-patterns: A Taxonomy. In: Bucchiarone, A., et al. Microservices. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31646-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31646-4_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31645-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31646-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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