The OpenDC Microservice Simulator: Design, Implementation, and Experimentation

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and implementation of OpenDC, a microservice simulator that models performance and supports experimentation with load balancing and request policies, aiding scalable microservice system analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel microservice simulation framework with configurable policies and demonstrates its use through experiments on request order and load balancing.

Findings

Simulator effectively models microservice performance.

Different load balancing policies impact system efficiency.

Request execution order influences response times.

Abstract

Microservices is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services, making it easy for developers to build and scale their applications. The microservices architecture approach differs from the traditional monolithic style of treating software development as a single entity. Microservice architecture is becoming more and more adapted. However, microservice systems can be complex due to dependencies between the microservices, resulting in unpredictable performance at a large scale. Simulation is a cheap and fast way to investigate the performance of microservices in more detail. This study aims to build a microservices simulator for evaluating and comparing microservices based applications. The microservices reference architecture is designed. The architecture is used as the basis for a simulator. The simulator implementation uses statistical models to generate the workload. The compelling features added to the simulator include concurrent execution of microservices, configurable request depth, three load-balancing policies and four request execution order policies. This paper contains two experiments to show the simulator usage. The first experiment covers request execution order policies at the microservice instance. The second experiment compares load balancing policies across microservice instances.