Microservice-based software architecture design has been widely dis-cussed, and best practices have been published as architecture design patterns.However, conformance to those patterns is hard to ensure and assess automati-cally, leading to problems such as architectural drift and erosion, especially in thecontext of continued software evolution or large-scale microservice systems. Inaddition, not much in the component and connector architecture models is spe-cific (only) to the microservices approach, whereas other aspects really specificto that approach, such as independent deployment of microservices, are usuallymodeled in other views or not at all. We suggest a set of constraints to check andmetrics to assess architecture conformance to microservice patterns. In compar-ison to expert judgment derived from the patterns, a subset of these constraintsand metrics shows a good relative performance and potential for automation.

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