Microservice Architecture from Enterprise Architecture Management Perspective

Microservice Architecture (MSA) is an architectural style to build distributed applications as a collection of independently deployable services. When adopting MSA, companies must drive some aspects that impact the organizational efficiency in order to guarantee (i) the strategic benefits of services; (ii) promote the best resources usage and (iii) separate the scopes of enterprise architecture (EA) decisions and microservice teams' decisions. This paper assesses the relevant factors about MSA from the enterprise architecture management (EAM) perspective and proposes an ArchiMate metamodel which serve as an architectural reference. Two methods with different approaches were selected to compose the model proposed, Extreme Enterprise Architecture Planning (XEAP) a top-down approach used here to plan microservices products and EA-Mini-Descriptions a bottom-up approach used to keep the EA up to date. In the end, (i) a model defining principles and governance guidelines, (ii) a generic model defining architectural responsibilities, and (iii) an architectural reference for technology standards which enable the enterprise governance of MSA, are engineered.