An Empirical Study on Microservices Deployment Trends, Topics and Challenges in Stack Overflow

Microservices architecture is increasingly adopted in modern software projects. Microservices deployment is often managed by tools like Spring Cloud, Consul, and Docker. Although there is existing research on microservices, practical deployment challenges are still under-explored, impacting the efficiency and success of applications. In this paper, we aim to identify and understand the challenges developers encounter with microservices deployment. We analyze trends in help requests on Stack Overflow, one of the most popular Q&A platforms for developers, to identify and categorize these challenges and highlight the most popular and difficult ones. First, we examined 1,214 Stack Overflow posts related to microservices deployment using topic modelling based on the BERTopic method to extract and analyze challenge topics. To obtain a more comprehensive understanding, we also analyzed the identified topics according to their popularity and difficulty. Our results reveal that discussions related to microservices deployment vary over time from 2013 to 2023. We identified nine distinct topics related to microservices deployment challenges, including deployment strategies, data management, composition and discovery, containerization, configuration, and orchestration in Kubernetes, security management, CI/CD pipeline automation, exposure to external clients, and post-deployment monitoring. Results reveal that microservices containerization is the most popular topic that poses numerous challenges to many users, with 2,148 average views and a 3.19 average score. While composition and discovery and post deployment monitoring are the most challenging topics, with 78 % of questions on post deployment monitoring lacking accepted answers, and 28 % of questions about composition and discovery remaining unanswered. This study identifies critical areas in microservices deployment that need further investigation, particularly, difficult and popular ones.