English

Temporal Network Analysis of Microservice Architectural Degradation

Software Engineering 2025-08-18 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Microservice architecture can be modeled as a network of microservices making calls to each other, commonly known as the service dependency graph. Network Science can provide methods to study such networks. In particular, temporal network analysis is a branch of Network Science that analyzes networks evolving with time. In microservice systems, temporal networks can arise if we examine the architecture of the system across releases or monitor a deployed system using tracing. In this research summary paper, I discuss the challenges in obtaining temporal networks from microservice systems and analyzing them with the temporal network methods. In particular, the most complete temporal network that we could obtain contains 7 time instances and 42 microservices, which limits the potential analysis that could be applied.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.11571,
  title  = {Temporal Network Analysis of Microservice Architectural Degradation},
  author = {Alexander Bakhtin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.11571},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:52:10.123Z