Employing Software Diversity in Cloud Microservices to Engineer Reliable and Performant Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach using software diversity and a reliability metric to dynamically manage microservice replicas, enhancing system dependability and performance in cloud environments.

Contribution

It proposes a reliability-aware autoscaling method that balances software diversity and reliability metrics to improve cloud microservice system robustness.

Findings

Effective in maintaining high reliability under adverse conditions

Improves system performance through diversity-aware autoscaling

Validated with experiments on real cloud microservice applications

Abstract

In the ever-shifting landscape of software engineering, we recognize the need for adaptation and evolution to maintain system dependability. As each software iteration potentially introduces new challenges, from unforeseen bugs to performance anomalies, it becomes paramount to understand and address these intricacies to ensure robust system operations during the lifetime. This work proposes employing software diversity to enhance system reliability and performance simultaneously. A cornerstone of our work is the derivation of a reliability metric. This metric encapsulates the reliability and performance of each software version under adverse conditions. Using the calculated reliability score, we implemented a dynamic controller responsible for adjusting the population of each software version. The goal is to maintain a higher replica count for more reliable versions while preserving the diversity of versions as much as possible. This balance is crucial for ensuring not only the reliability but also the performance of the system against a spectrum of potential failures. In addition, we designed and implemented a diversity-aware autoscaling algorithm that maintains the reliability and performance of the system at the same time and at any scale. Our extensive experiments on realistic cloud microservice-based applications show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in this paper in promoting both reliability and performance.