Microservices Integrated Performance and Reliability Testing

Continuous quality assurance for extra-functional properties of modern software systems is today a big challenge as their complexity is constantly increasing to satisfy market demands. This is the case of microservice systems. They provide high control on the scale of operation by means of fine-grained service decomposition, but this demands careful consideration of the relations between performance of individual microservices and service failures. In this work, we propose MIPaRT, a novel methodology, and platform to automatically test microservice operations for performance and reliability in combination. The proposed platform can be integrated into a DevOps cycle to support continuous testing and monitoring by the automatic (1) generation and execution of performance-reliability ex-vivo testing sessions, (2) collection of monitoring data, (3) computation of performance and reliability metrics, and (4) integrated visualization of the results. We apply our approach by operating the platform on an open source benchmark. Results show that our integrated approach can provide additional insights into the performance and reliability behaviour of microservices as well as their mutual relationships.

Automated summary

Continuous quality assurance for extra-functional properties of modern software systems is a challenge. We propose a novel methodology and platform, called MIPaRT, for automatically testing the performance and reliability of microservice operations. The platform supports continuous testing and monitoring, and provides additional insights into the performance and reliability behavior of microservices.