A Model-driven Approach for Continuous Performance Engineering in Microservice-based Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a model-driven method that uses traceability between monitored data and architectural models to suggest refactoring actions for improving performance in microservice systems.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic, model-driven approach leveraging traceability to manage performance issues during microservice system evolution and re-deployment.

Findings

Validated on two microservice systems in e-commerce and ticket reservation domains.

Effectively derived refactoring actions leading to performance improvements.

Demonstrated applicability of UML with MARTE for architectural modeling.

Abstract

Microservices are quite widely impacting on the software industry in recent years. Rapid evolution and continuous deployment represent specific benefits of microservice-based systems, but they may have a significant impact on non-functional properties like performance. Despite the obvious relevance of this property, there is still a lack of systematic approaches that explicitly take into account performance issues in the lifecycle of microservice-based systems. In such a context of evolution and re-deployment, Model-Driven Engineering techniques can provide major support to various software engineering activities, and in particular they can allow managing the relationships between a running system and its architectural model. In this paper, we propose a model-driven integrated approach that exploits traceability relationships between the monitored data of a microservice-based running system and its architectural model to derive recommended refactoring actions that lead to performance improvement. The approach has been applied and validated on two microservice-based systems, in the domain of e-commerce and ticket reservation, respectively, whose architectural models have been designed in UML profiled with MARTE.