We Need to Talk About Microservices: an Analysis from the Discussions on StackOverflow

Microservices are a new and rapidly growing architectural model aimed at developing highly scalable software solutions based on independently deployable and evolvable components. Due to its novelty, microservice-related discussions are increasing in Q&A websites, such as StackOverflow (SO). In order to understand what is being discussed by the microservice community, this work has applied mining techniques and topic modelling to a manually-curated dataset of 1,043 microservice-related posts from StackOverflow. As a result, we found that 13.68% of microservice technical posts on SO discuss a single technology: Netflix Eureka. Moreover, buzzwords in the microservice ecosystem, e.g., blue/green deployment, were not identified as relevant subjects of discussion on SO. Finally, we show how a high discussion rate on SO may not reflect the popularity of a certain subject within the microservice community.