Digital Twinning for Microservice Architectures

Digital twins have been designed and implemented for diverse applications like smart manufacturing, healthcare, supply chain and retail management. They provide monitoring, remote prognostics and health management capabilities for the various physical assets used in these domains. Many of these capabilities would be beneficial to microservice architectures as well, given the need for lightweight monitoring solutions in multitenant environments. In particular, twins can provide operators with real-time resource usage metrics which help with operational objectives such as resource planning, anomaly detection, rewind and replay and so on. In this work, we propose a design for building digital twins for microservice architectures. As a proof of concept, we focus on modelling the resource utilization as that is a key requirement for monitoring system reliability and security. In general, digital twins require a real world counterpart, a virtual model and a mechanism for consistently keeping both synchronized. We focus on the two latter aspects of the digital twin. Our approach involves converting a formal model of a microservice architecture into a digital twin that can capture and execute an actual cluster's state. We present an extensible architecture connecting the various components of the system and the twin and evaluate the twin's ability to capture the real-time state of a real Kubernetes cluster. We also discuss future extensions which can enhance the system's security by detecting a broad range of attacks.