A systematic mapping study: The new age of software architecture from monolithic to microservice architecture-awareness and challenges

Microservice architecture (MSA) is an emerging architectural style as an innovative approach that is growing in quality over time. Microservices are endorsed by various researchers to shatter the issues and limitations encountered by the use of aging approaches for monolithic legacy architecture styles. Nonetheless, there exists no state of the research exhaustive study on migration to MSA from monolithic architecture. MSA has made the need to design the development methods of software and styles of architectures that satisfy these demands. The design of software architecture is the ongoing rise of MSA to address the independent deployment, scalability, and maintenance requirements. In this article, a systematic mapping study (SMS) was performed, including the literature on the migration approaches published between 2010 and 2021 to evaluate the contemporary state of the art and practice of software architecting. This study outlines the awareness and importance of MSA. Seventy-three studies were finally selected in this SMS. The following perspectives of this study are publication trends, main venues, the focus of research, migration approaches, migration challenges, successful factors after migration, and the potential for industrial adoption. We synthesize the data and give a summary of the state of the art. This study also provides future research directions and applications for adopting microservices.