Equivalence-Enhanced Microservice Workflow Orchestration to Efficiently Increase Reliability

Zheng Song, Eli Tilevich

Abstract: The applicability of the microservice architecture has extended beyond traditional web services, making steady inroads into the domains of IoT and edge computing. Due to dissimilar contexts in different execution environments and inherent mobility, edge and IoT applications suffer from low execution reliability. Replication, traditionally used to increase service reliability and scalability, is inapplicable in these resource-scarce environments. Alternately, programmers can orchestrate the parallel or sequential execution of equivalent microservices-microservices that provide the same functionality by different means. Unfortunately, the resulting orchestrations rely on parallelization, synchronization, and failure handing, all tedious and error-prone to implement. Although automated orchestration shifts the burden of generating workflows from the programmer to the compiler, existing programming models lack both syntactic and semantic support for equivalence. In this paper, we enhance compiler-generated execution orchestration with equivalence to efficiently increase reliability. We introduce a dataflow-based domain-specific language, whose dataflow specifications include the implicit declarations of equivalent microservices and their execution patterns. To automatically generate reliable workflows and execute them efficiently, we introduce new equivalence workflow constructs. Our evaluation results indicate that our solution can effectively and efficiently increase the reliability of microservice-based applications.