What We Know About Software Architecture Styles in Continuous Delivery and DevOps?

This paper takes a software architect's perspective to DevOps/CD and attempts to provide a consolidated view on the architecture styles for which empirical publications indicate to be suitable in the context of DevOps and CD. Following techniques from the evidence-based software engineering paradigm, we set out to answer a number of research questions pertaining to (1) the architecture characteristics important in DevOps/CD projects according to published literature, (2) the architectural styles found to work well in this context, (3) the application domains in which architecture characteristics and styles were evaluated, and (4) the empirical method being used by researchers on this topic. We applied a research protocol grounded on well-established systematic literature review guidelines, and evaluated sources published between 2009 and 2019. Our results indicate that (a) 17 software architecture characteristics are beneficial for CD and DevOps adoption, (b) micro-services are a dominant architectural style in this context, and (c) large-scale organizational contexts are the most studied, and (d) qualitative approaches (case study based) are the most applied research method.