Strategies for Request-Response Logging in Microservices Architecture

Microservices Architecture is the prevailing architectural choice today for building distributed software systems in various business sectors, such as telecommunications, e-commerce, and finance. It is often necessary to log the full content of request and response messages (i.e., the entire body of these messages) that are entering and leaving such distributed systems due to legal book-keeping requirements. In this work, two systematic design strategies were used to realize the structured logging of request-response messages including their entire message body, particularly in a microservices architecture-based distributed software system. As a case study, a prototype per strategy was implemented and deployed into an existing Microservices Architecture-based banking system, which was provided by a commercial bank for the research presented in this paper in the Kubernetes cluster. Load tests were performed against this banking system to measure average request throughputs and average response times per logging strategy for analysis purposes. The results that are presented in this paper are expected to be helpful for both researchers and practitioners in the software industry who need a similar logging solution.