A Graph-based Solution to Deal with Cyclic Dependencies in Microservices Architecture

Microservices represents the most suitable architectural style to create cloud-native applications. Microservices is implemented by distributing the development to many small independent teams. Each team can make progress more independently of the others. That is what gives big organizations the ability to properly scale development in order to ensure the very demanding needs of their customers. However, it is actually quite difficult to achieve this desired “decoupled independence” of services since many anti-patterns can lead to opposite results. One of these classical anti-patterns is called “Cyclic Dependencies”. In this paper, we provide a graph-based proposal that focuses on laying the foundations for solutions aiming to assist architects at design time to automatically detect the Cyclic Dependencies anti-pattern in microservices.