MSTG: A Flexible and Scalable Microservices Infrastructure Generator

TL;DR

This paper introduces MSTG, a flexible tool for generating and evaluating scalable microservices architectures that consider both application and networking layers, supporting deployment on Docker and Kubernetes.

Contribution

MSTG is a novel, modular tool that simulates complete microservices architectures, including networking, with YAML-based configuration and integrated telemetry support.

Findings

MSTG effectively generates configurations for Docker and Kubernetes.

The tool accurately simulates network and application performance.

MSTG demonstrates scalability and versatility through various use cases.

Abstract

The last few years in the software engineering field has seen a paradigm shift from monolithic application towards architectures in which the application is split in various smaller entities (i.e., microservices) fueled by the improved availability and ease of use of containers technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. Those microservices communicate between each other using networking technologies in place of function calls in traditional monolithic software. In order to be able to evaluate the potential, the modularity, and the scalability of this new approach, many tools, such as microservices benchmarking, have been developed with that objective in mind. Unfortunately, many of these tend to focus only on the application layer while not taking the underlying networking infrastructure into consideration. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate the performance of a new modular and scalable tool, MicroServices Topology Generator (MSTG), that allows to simulate both the application and networking layers of a microservices architecture. Based on a topology described in YAML format, MSTG generates the configuration file(s) for deploying the architecture on either Docker Composer or Kubernetes. Furthermore, MSTG encompasses telemetry tools, such as Application Performance Monitoring (APM) relying on OpenTelemetry. This paper fully describes MSTG, evaluates its performance, and demonstrates its potential through several use cases.