Abstract
The accelerating progress of network speed, reliability and security creates an increasing demand to move software and services from being stored and processed locally on users' machines to being managed by third parties that are accessible through the network. This has created the need to develop new software development methods and software architectural styles that meet these new demands. One such example in software architectural design is the recent emergence of the microservices architecture to address the maintenance and scalability demands of online service providers. As microservice architecture is a new research area, the need for a systematic mapping study is crucial in order to summarise the progress so far and identify the gaps and requirements for future studies. In this paper we present a systematic mapping study of microservices architectures and their implementation. Our study focuses on identifying architectural challenges, the architectural diagrams/views and quality attributes related to microsevice systems.