Distributed Application Architecture and Key Technologies: Formal Analysis and Evaluation Framework for Microservice Adoption

Abstract

Microservice architecture (MSA) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for designing and deploying distributed software systems, offering granular scalability, independent deployability, and technological heterogeneity at the cost of substantially increased operational complexity. Despite its widespread industry adoption, a coherent formal analytical basis and a generalisable evaluation framework for guiding MSA adoption decisions remain underdeveloped in the academic literature. This review synthesises scholarly research published between 2014 and April 2026 to examine the foundational concepts underpinning MSA, the enabling technologies that make it tractable in practice, and the formal analysis and quality assessment approaches proposed to guide architectural decision-making. The key technologies reviewed include containerisation, container orchestration, service mesh frameworks, application programming interface gateways, event-driven messaging systems, and distributed observability tooling. The review further examines migration strategies from monolithic systems, decomposition methodologies grounded in domain-driven design, and the application of formal verification methods to distributed service systems. A multi-dimensional evaluation framework is proposed, integrating organisational readiness, technical capability, security posture, and quality attribute trade-off analysis to support structured MSA adoption decisions. The review identifies significant gaps regarding standardised readiness assessment tools, empirically validated decomposition criteria, and formal methods applicable at the architectural level — gaps that point towards a pressing need for integrated, evidence-based frameworks capable of guiding practitioners through the complex socio-technical challenges of MSA adoption.