A Quantitative Approach for the Assessment of Microservice Architecture Deployment Alternatives by Automated Performance Testing.

Microservices have emerged as an architectural style for developing distributed applications. Assessing the performance of architectural deployment alternatives is challenging and must be aligned with the system usage in the production environment. In this paper, we introduce an approach for using operational profiles to generate load tests to automatically assess scalability pass/fail criteria of several microservices deployment alternatives. We have evaluated our approach with different architecture deployment alternatives using extensive lab studies in a large bare metal host environment and a virtualized environment. The data presented in this paper supports the need to carefully evaluate the impact of increasing the level of computing resources on performance. Specifically, for the case study presented in this paper, we observed that the evaluated performance metric is a non-increasing function of the number of CPU resources for one of the environments under study.