TeaStore: A Micro-Service Reference Application for Benchmarking, Modeling and Resource Management Research

André Bauer

Abstract:

Modern distributed applications offer complex per-
formance behavior and many degrees of freedom regarding
deployment and configuration. Researchers employ various meth-
ods of analysis, modeling, and management that leverage these
degrees of freedom to predict or improve non-functional proper-
ties of the software under consideration. In order to demonstrate
and evaluate their applicability in the real world, methods
resulting from such research areas require test and reference
applications that offer a range of different behaviors, as well as
the necessary degrees of freedom.
Existing production software is often inaccessible for re-
searchers or closed off to instrumentation. Existing testing
and benchmarking frameworks, on the other hand, are either
designed for specific testing scenarios, or they do not offer the
necessary degrees of freedom. Further, most test applications are
difficult to deploy and run, or are outdated.
In this paper, we introduce the TeaStore, a state-of-the-art
micro-service-based test and reference application. TeaStore of-
fers services with different performance characteristics and many
degrees of freedom regarding deployment and configuration to
be used as a benchmarking framework for researchers. The
TeaStore allows evaluating performance modeling and resource
management techniques; it also offers instrumented variants to
enable extensive run-time analysis. We demonstrate TeaStore’s
use in three contexts: performance modeling, cloud resource
management, and energy efficiency analysis. Our experiments
show that TeaStore can be used for evaluating novel approaches
in these contexts and also motivates further research in the areas
of performance modeling and resource management.