Assessing the quality of microservice and monolithic architectures: systematic literature review

Abstract Scalable solutions have become extremely required with the emergence of cloud computing and the transformation to microservices-based applications. Although creating software is challenging, creating a scalable system is far more challenging. A microservices architecture is a collection of smaller, independently deployable services as opposed to a monolithic application, which is created as a single integrated entity. The objective is to pave the way for a generic framework that helps companies and industries in their migration to microservices and get a methodology for evaluation that a company might use to compare its utilisation of microservices. This effort aims to enable enterprises to assess their capacity to successfully adopt microservices through the use of quality criteria. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to find 48 selected research papers over the last four years (2020–2023) and compile pertinent research that provides data about contrasting the quality attributes of monolithic and microservice applications. This study demonstrates how choosing quality attribute metrics can provide a more accurate evaluation of both monolithic and microservice systems. The shift from a monolithic to a microservice-based architecture will be made possible thanks to the relevant indicators we provide. According to the findings of the literature review, the most important quality attributes and subcharacters are: performance, scalability, coupling, cohesion, deployment, security, development, complexity, maintainability, and availability. The findings indicate a rising tendency in the research community towards quality-driven migration to microservices, and numerous researchers take quality characteristics into account in the methods they outline in their work and include quality improvement as one of the migration aims.