On the Way to Microservices: Exploring Problems and Solutions from Online Q&A Community

Microservice architecture is a dominant architectural style in SaaS industry, which helps to develop a single application as a collection of independent, well-defined, and inter-communicating services. The number of microservice-related questions in Q&Awebsites, such as Stack Overflow, has expanded substantially over the last years. Due to its increasing popularity, it is essential to understand the existing problems that microservice developers face in practices as well as the potential solutions to these problems. Such an investigation of problems and solutions is vital for long-term, impactful, and qualified research and practices in microservice community. Unfortunately, we currently know relatively little about such knowledge. To fill this gap, we conduct a large-scale in-depth empirical study on 17,522 Stack Overflow microservice-related posts. Our analysis leads to the first taxonomy of microservice-related topics based on the software development process. By analyzing the characteristics of the accepted answers, we find that there are fewer experts in the microservice than other domains, and such a phenomenon is most significant with respect to the microservice design phase. Furthermore, we perform manual analysis on 6,013 answers accepted by developers and distill 47 general solution strategies for different microservice-related problems, 22 of which are proposed for the first time. For instance, several problems inherent in the delivery phase can be lessened by referring to external sources like GitHub code examples. Our findings can therefore facilitate research and development on emerging microservice systems.