Analytical Modeling and Empirical Validation of Performability of Service- and Cloud-Based Dynamic Routing Architecture Patterns

Many dynamic routing architectural patterns are available, including distributed routing, e.g., using the sidecar pattern, or centralized routing, e.g., using event stores or service buses. Different Quality-of-Service (QoS) factors influence routing schemas and technology selection, such as performance, reliability, scalability, and control properties offered by the patterns. An analytical model can formalize the QoS factors and facilitate the architectural decision-making when changing the routing scheme, i.e., to more distributed or centralized routing. So far, the impact of these architectural patterns on performability, i.e., the overall performance of a system with impeded reliability, has not been extensively studied. This is important because deciding to increase performance, e.g., by parallel processing of requests, may lead to decreased reliability because of the added points of a crash. We propose an analytical performability model during component crashes. For the empirical validation of our proposed model, we ran an extensive experiment of 2412 hours of runtime on a private cloud infrastructure and Google Cloud Platform. The low prediction error of 1.75 % indicates the high accuracy of our performability model. These results provide important insights when making architectural decisions regarding service- and cloud-based dynamic routing.