Simulation Approaches for Supporting Microservice Architectures: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Microservice Architecture (MSA) has become a dominant architectural style due to its scalability, modularity, and resilience. However, evaluating and optimising MSA systems remains complex, particularly in performance assessment, architectural decision-making, and system behaviour analysis. Simulation has been explored as a technique to address these challenges, yet a comprehensive synthesis of its applications, methodologies, and effectiveness in MSA research is lacking. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) follows Kitchenham’s guidelines to investigate how simulation has been applied to MSA research, addressing 11 research questions, covering aspects such as the motivations for using simulation, architectural decisions it supports, quality attributes analysed, modelling techniques used, validation methods, and available simulation tools. After conducting a systematic search across four major digital libraries, 68 primary studies were selected for data extraction and analysis. The findings reveal persistent gaps in areas such as migration support, security and fault propagation modelling, and real-world validation with datasets. They highlight the need for more realistic and adaptive simulation frameworks that integrate authentic artefacts, support runtime calibration, and explore emerging opportunities such as LLM-assisted modelling. These directions establish an agenda for advancing simulation as a proactive capability in microservice system design and resiliency.