A Techno-Economic Assessment of Microservices

The microservices design paradigm enables applications, usually based on containers, exploiting the flexibility of cloud computing and bringing unique scalability, fault-tolerance and resource-allocation benefits. A number of orchestration facilities, including Kubernetes, target the efficient deployment and operation of containers and are mainly focusing on the maintenance of server resource allocation under predefined thresholds, i.e., through scaling up or down containers to mitigate dynamic changes in the workload. In this work, we highlight the technical capabilities and cost-saving impact of microservices in contrast to traditional monolithic applications, based on a techno-economic analysis. We also investigate the service performance vs resource allocation trade-off, uncovering interesting dynamics when elasticity is driven from service quality metrics. This approach allows the Service Providers (SPs) to balance their profit margins with the customer satisfaction, i.e., reducing the infrastructure cost while keeping the service performance at an acceptable level.