Reviving Software Diversity in Microservices to Optimize the Performance of Software Systems

Prabjot Dhaliwal, Hamzeh Khazaei

Abstract: With the increasing popularity and complexity of microservice software systems, satisfying the performance requirements of these systems becomes a non-trivial task. While horizontal auto-scaling is a common remedy to this problem, it is not necessarily cost-effective and the proper solution for all scenarios. Also, regardless of the number of replicas, they are all prone to common bug failure. In this poster/demo, we present an agile and cost-effective approach for satisfying the performance requirements of microservice software systems without incurring extra costs on the service provider. We research how performance, i.e., response time, can be tamed by applying software diversity, aka multi-versioning, to the system's resource-heavy critical services. We use our open-source extension of the Docker framework, called DockerMV, to deploy microservice systems with multi-versioning embedded underneath. We also propose a dynamic load-balancing service that proactively adapts to the various versions depending on current and near-future performance needs. We demonstrate the efficacy of multi-versioning for satisfying the performance requirements of microservice software systems through extensive experiments on TeaStore, a microservice reference test application, and Znn, a containerized news portal. We will present our results through the poster and a live demonstration throughout the conference. A preliminary demo of our work can be accessed here11https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeMCxlDtU64. The GitHub repository of our work can be accessed here22https://github.com/prabjot09/nginx-dynamic-load-balancing.