[IEEE CLOUD 2023] HydraGen: A Microservice Benchmark Generator
Channel: Mohammad Reza Saleh Sedghpour
Date: 2023-06-29

This paper is accepted in IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing.

By:
Mohammad Reza Saleh Sedghpour*, Aleksandra Obeso Duque*^,  Xuejun Cai^, Björn Skubic^,  Erik Elmroth*, Cristian Klein*, and Johan Tordsson*

* Department of Computing Science, Umeå University, Sweden
Email: {msaleh,alekodu,elmroth,cklein,tordsson}@cs.umu.se

^ Ericsson Research, Stockholm, Sweden
Email: {aleksandra.obeso.duque,xuejun.cai,bjorn.skubic}@ericsson.com

Abstract:
Microservice-based architectures have become ubiquitous in large-scale software systems. Experimental cloud researchers constantly propose  enhanced resource management mechanisms for such systems. These mechanisms need to be evaluated using both realistic and flexible microservice benchmarks to study in which ways diverse application characteristics can affect their performance and scalability. However, current microservice benchmarks have limitations including static computational complexity, limited architectural scale, and fixed topology (i.e., number of tiers, fan-in, and fan-out characteristics).
We therefore propose HydraGen, a tool that enables researchers to systematically generate benchmarks with different computational complexities and topologies, to tackle experimental evaluation of performance at scale for web-serving applications, with a focus on inter-service communication. To illustrate the potential of our open-source tool, we demonstrate how it can reproduce an existing microservice benchmark with preserved architectural properties. We also demonstrate how HydraGen can enrich the evaluation of cloud management systems based on a case study related to traffic engineering.

Keywords:
microservices, benchmark generator, performance analysis, emulation, validation, cloud systems.