Fast and Efficient What-If Analyses of Invocation Overhead and Transactional Boundaries to Support the Migration to Microservices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a trace rewriting approach for rapid, user-friendly what-if analyses to evaluate the impact of microservice decomposition on performance and consistency, aiding migration decisions.

Contribution

It presents a novel, fast, and easy-to-use method for analyzing non-functional impacts of microservice boundaries through trace rewriting, prioritizing speed over precision.

Findings

Approach enables quick scenario exploration for microservice migration.

Method emphasizes ease of use and speed over detailed accuracy.

Industrial case study demonstrates practical applicability.

Abstract

Improving agility and maintainability are common drivers for companies to adopt a microservice architecture for their existing software systems. However, the existing software often relies heavily on the fact that it is executed within a single process space. Therefore, decomposing existing software into out-of-process components like microservices can have a severe impact on non-functional properties, such as overall performance due to invocation overhead or data consistency. To minimize this impact, it is important to consider non-functional properties already as part of the design process of the service boundaries. A useful method for such considerations are what-if analyses, which allow to explore different scenarios and to develop the service boundaries in an iterative and incremental way. Experience from an industrial case study suggests that for these analyses, ease of use and speed tend to be more important than precision. In this paper, we present emerging results for an approach for what-if analyses based on trace rewriting that is (i) specifically designed for analyzing the impact on non-functional properties due to decomposition into out-of-process components and (ii) deliberately prefers ease of use and analysis speed over precision of the results.