μBench: An Open-Source Factory of Benchmark Microservice Applications

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Bench is an open-source tool for benchmarking cloud/edge computing platforms that run microservice applications. The tool creates dummy microservice applications that can be customized and executed on a Kubernetes cluster.
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Bench allows users to control fundamental properties of the microservice applications it creates, such as service mesh topology, microservices’ behaviors using a portfolio of stress functions (e.g., for CPU, memory, I/O, network) or implementing new ones, microservice-to-microservice API (HTTP or gRPC), etc. Application performance can be evaluated by stochastic or trace-driven workloads. μBench is aimed at researchers and cloud platform developers who lack real microservice applications to benchmark their findings (e.g., new resource control mechanisms, artificial intelligence-driven orchestration, etc.) or wish to thoroughly evaluate their proposals versus a broad set of heterogeneous applications that μBench can create. In addition to the description of μBench, in this article, we show one possible use of it. We compared advantages and disadvantages of microservice architectures versus monolithic ones, and analyzed the performance impact of key architectural choices, such as service mesh topology and the use of replication. For this analysis, we generated several microservice applications with different properties, and two of them are derived from a real cloud dataset.