Optimal and Automated Deployment for Microservices

TL;DR

This paper formalizes automated deployment for microservices, demonstrating its algorithmic treatability under specific assumptions, and presents an implementation of an optimal deployment tool tested on realistic architectures.

Contribution

It introduces a formal model for microservice deployment, proving its algorithmic solvability, and provides a practical tool for automatic optimal deployment planning.

Findings

Automated deployment is algorithmically treatable for microservices under certain assumptions.

An automatic deployment tool was implemented and tested on realistic architectures.

The approach enables optimal deployment planning in microservice environments.

Abstract

Microservices are highly modular and scalable Service Oriented Architectures. They underpin automated deployment practices like Continuous Deployment and Autoscaling. In this paper, we formalize these practices and show that automated deployment - proven undecidable in the general case - is algorithmically treatable for microservices. Our key assumption is that the configuration life-cycle of a microservice is split into two phases: (i) creation, which entails establishing initial connections with already available microservices, and (ii) subsequent binding/unbinding with other microservices. To illustrate the applicability of our approach, we implement an automatic optimal deployment tool and compute deployment plans for a realistic microservice architecture, modeled in the Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) language.

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