  Purpose: Microservice Architecture (MSA) denotes an increasingly popular
architectural style in which business capabilities are wrapped into
autonomously developable and deployable software components called
microservices. Microservice applications are developed by multiple DevOps teams
each owning one or more services. In this article, we explore the state of how
DevOps teams in small and medium-sized organizations (SMOs) cope with MSA and
how they can be supported.
  Methods: We show through a secondary analysis of an exploratory interview
study comprising six cases, that the organizational and technological
complexity resulting from MSA poses particular challenges for small and
medium-sized organizations (SMOs). We apply Model-Driven Engineering to address
these challenges.
  Results: As results of the second analysis, we identify the challenge areas
of building and maintaining a common architectural understanding, and dealing
with deployment technologies. To support DevOps teams of SMOs in coping with
these challenges, we present a model-driven workflow based on LEMMA - the
Language Ecosystem for Modeling Microservice Architecture. To implement the
workflow, we extend LEMMA with the functionality to (i) generate models from
API documentation; (ii) reference remote models owned by other teams; (iii)
generate deployment specifications; and (iv) generate a visual representation
of the overall architecture.
  Conclusion: We validate the model-driven workflow and our extensions to LEMMA
through a case study showing that the added functionality to LEMMA can bring
efficiency gains for DevOps teams. To develop best practices for applying our
workflow to maximize efficiency in SMOs, we plan to conduct more empirical
research in the field in the future.
