Abstract

In modern software systems, Microservice Architecture (MSA) has gained popularity over monolithic design by providing the ability for flexible and independently upgradable services. Although there are considerable benefits that MSA provides, as new microservices are introduced into these MSA-based systems, they can become increasingly complex and hard to understand. Architectural languages are a potential solution to this problem because they can provide a comprehensive overview of system’s architecture as it changes. In this paper, the authors conduct a systematic mapping study to identify the architectural languages discussed in academia. In particular, the authors observe the architectural languages that have the capability of representing MSA-based systems. Through the use of a detailed query in 4 reliable indexers, a collection of 402 papers were filtered down to a small set of 19 relevant papers. This filtration was done based on a research paper inclusion criteria and a language inclusion criteria. With these papers, a total of 12 architectural languages were investigated for the representation of MSA-based systems.