Efficiency Analysis of Provisioning Microservices

Microservice architecture has started a new trend for application development/deployment in cloud due to its flexibility, scalability, manageability and performance. Various microservice platforms have emerged to facilitate the whole software engineering cycle for cloud applications from design, development, test, deployment to maintenance. In this paper, we propose a performance analytical model and validate it by experiments to study the provisioning performance of microservice platforms. We design and develop a microservice platform on Amazon EC2 cloud using Docker technology family to identify important elements contributing to the performance of microservice platforms. We leverage the results and insights from experiments to build a tractable analytical performance model that can be used to perform what-if analysis and capacity planning in a systematic manner for large scale microservices with minimum amount of time and cost.