Microservices Deployment: A Systematic Mapping Study

The microservices architecture is a set of small, autonomous services that can work together to form a single application that has seen widespread adoption by practitioners. However, deploying this architecture creates several technical challenges. This study examines the state of the art of microservices deployment in the literature, informing researchers and practitioners about the techniques and technologies used in the deployment of microservices and, practices used in the DevOps culture. We conducted a systematic mapping study driven by four research questions related to the deployment of microservices and DevOps practices, and 21 studies were identified from which information was synthesized using the meta-aggregation method. With the information synthesis, 43 findings were extracted and classified into seven categories. We can summarize the findings of this study as follows: (i) We identified the essential DevOps practices in the deployment of microservices. (ii) We defined the stack of technologies with the highest incidence in the studies. (iii) We found three groups of challenges in microservices deployment. (iv) Finally, we present a set of recommendations for microservices deployment.