In the context of the BI-REX (Big Data Innovation and Research Excellence) competence center SEAWALL (SEAmless loW lAtency cLoud pLatforms) project (scientific coordinator Prof. Maurizio Gabbrielli) we develop a novel approach for run-time global adaptation of microservice applications, based on synthesis of architecture-level reconfiguration orchestrations. More precisely, we devise an algorithm for automatic reconfiguration that reaches a target system Maximum Computational Load by performing optimal deployment orchestrations. To conceive and simulate our approach, we introduce a novel integrated timed architectural modeling/execution language based on an extension of the actor-based object-oriented Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) language. In particular, we realize a timed extension of SmartDeployer, whose ABS code annotations make it possible to express architectural properties. Our Timed SmartDeployer tool fully integrates time features of ABS and architectural annotations by generating timed deployment orchestrations. We evaluate the applicability of our approach on a realistic microservice application taken from the literature: an Email Pipeline Processing System. We prove its effectiveness by simulating such an application and by comparing architecture-level reconfiguration with traditional local scaling techniques (which detect scaling needs and enact replications at the level of single microservices). Our comparison results show that our approach avoids cascading slowdowns and consequent increased message loss and latency, which affect traditional local scaling.
Following previous work on the automated deployment orchestration of component based applications, where orchestrations are expressed in terms of behaviours satisfying component interface functional dependences, we develop a formal model specifically tailored for microservice architectures. The first result that we obtain is decidability of the problem of synthesizing optimal deployment orchestrations for microservice architectures, a problem that is, instead, undecidable for generic component-based applications. We, thus, show how optimal deployment orchestrations can be synthesized and how, …
Context: Microservices running and being powered by Edge Computing have been gaining much attention in the industry and academia. Since 2014, when Martin Fowler popularized the Microservice term, many studies have been published relating these subjects to explore how the Edge's low-latency feature could be combined with the high throughput of the distributed paradigm from Microservices. Objective: Identifying how Microservices work together with Edge Computing whereas they take advantage when running on Edge. Method: In order to better understand this relationship, we first identified its key …
Microservices have become the de-facto software architecture for cloud-native applications. A contentious architectural decision in microservices is to compose them using choreography or orchestration. In choreography, every service works independently, whereas, in orchestration, there is a controller that coordinates service interactions. This paper makes a case for orchestration. The promise of microservices is that each microservice can be independently developed, deployed, tested, upgraded, and scaled. This makes them suitable for systems running on cloud infrastructures. However, microser…
Microservices are highly modular and scalable Service Oriented Architectures. They underpin automated deployment practices like Continuous Deployment and Autoscaling. In this paper, we formalize these practices and show that automated deployment - proven undecidable in the general case - is algorithmically treatable for microservices. Our key assumption is that the configuration life-cycle of a microservice is split into two phases: (i) creation, which entails establishing initial connections with already available microservices, and (ii) subsequent binding/unbinding with other microservices. …
Cloud and edge computing have been widely adopted in many application scenarios. With the increasing demand of fast iteration and complexity of business logic, it is challenging to achieve rapid development and continuous delivery in such highly distributed cloud and edge computing environment. At present, microservice-based architecture has been the dominant deployment style, and a microservice system has to evolve agilely to offer stable Quality of Service (QoS) in the situation where user requirement changes frequently. Many research have been conducted to optimally re-deploy microservices …
Current cloud services are moving away from monolithic designs and towards graphs of many loosely-coupled, single-concerned microservices. Microservices have several advantages, including speeding up development and deployment, allowing specialization of the software infrastructure, and helping with debugging and error isolation. At the same time they introduce several hardware and software challenges. Given that most of the performance and efficiency implications of microservices happen at scales larger than what is available outside production deployments, studying such effects requires desi…
StatuScale: Status-aware and Elastic Scaling Strategy for Microservice Applications
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Universitas Indonesia（印度尼西亚大学）；University of Hyderabad（海得拉巴大学）；State Key Lab of IOTSC, University of Macau（澳门大学物联网科学与工程国家重点实验室）
Microservice and serverless computing systems open up massive versatility and opportunity to distributed and datacenter-scale computing. In the meantime, the deployments of modern datacenter resources are moving to disaggregated architectures. With the flourishing growths from both sides, we believe this is high time to write this vision paper to propose a potential research agenda to achieve efficient deployments, management, and executions of next-generation microservices on top of the emerging disaggregated datacenter architectures. In particular, we envision a critical systems research dir…
Auto-scaling Approaches for Microservice Applications: A Survey and Taxonomy
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Quantum Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (qCLOUDS) Laboratory, School of Computing and Information Systems, the University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学计算与信息系量子云计算与分布式系统（qCLOUDS）实验室）；State Key Lab of IOTSC, University of Macau（澳门大学物联网智慧应用国家重点实验室）
Containers, enabling lightweight environment and performance isolation, fast and flexible deployment, and fine-grained resource sharing, have gained popularity in better application management and deployment in addition to hardware virtualization. They are being widely used by organizations to deploy their increasingly diverse workloads derived from modern-day applications such as web services, big data, and IoT in either proprietary clusters or private and public cloud data centers. This has led to the emergence of container orchestration platforms, which are designed to manage the deployment…
Microservice Deployment in Space Computing Power Networks via Robust Reinforcement Learning
School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Cloud applications are increasingly shifting from large monolithic services, to large numbers of loosely-coupled, specialized microservices. Despite their advantages in terms of facilitating development, deployment, modularity, and isolation, microservices complicate resource management, as dependencies between them introduce backpressure effects and cascading QoS violations. We present Sinan, a data-driven cluster manager for interactive cloud microservices that is online and QoS-aware. Sinan leverages a set of scalable and validated machine learning models to determine the performance impact…
Containerisation demonstrates its efficiency in application deployment in cloud computing. Containers can encapsulate complex programs with their dependencies in isolated environments, hence are being adopted in HPC clusters. HPC workload managers lack micro-services support and deeply integrated container management, as opposed to container orchestrators (e.g. Kubernetes). We introduce Torque-Operator (a plugin) which serves as a bridge between HPC workload managers and container Orchestrators.
To date, cloud applications have used datacenter resources through manual configuration and deployment of virtual machines and containers. Current trends see increasing use of microservices, where larger applications are split into many small containers, to be developed and deployed independently. However, even with the rise of the devops movement and orchestration facilities such as Kubernetes, there is a tendency to separate development from deployment. We present an exploration of a more extreme point on the devops spectrum: Fractal. Developers embed orchestration logic inside their applica…
AI-based monitoring has become crucial for cloud-based services due to its scale. A common approach to AI-based monitoring is to detect causal relationships among service components and build a causal graph. Availability of domain information makes cloud systems even better suited for such causal detection approaches. In modern cloud systems, however, auto-scalers dynamically change the number of microservice instances, and a load-balancer manages the load on each instance. This poses a challenge for off-the-shelf causal structure detection techniques as they neither incorporate the system arc…
The cloud is a new paradigm that is paving the way for new approaches and standards. The architectural styles are evolving in response to the cloud's requirements. In recent years, microservices have emerged as the preferred architectural style for scalable, rapidly evolving cloud applications. The adoption of microservices to the detriment of monolithic structures, which are increasingly being phased out, is one of the most significant developments in business architecture. Cloud-native architectures make microservices system deployment more productive, adaptable, and cost-effective. Regardle…
Mobile networks are becoming energy hungry, and this trend is expected to continue due to a surge in communication and computation demand. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), will entail energy-consuming services and applications, with non-negligible impact in terms of ecological sustainability. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of existing approaches to make edge computing networks greener, including but not limited to the exploitation of renewable energy resources, and context-awareness. We hence provide an updated account of recent developments on MEC from an energetic sustain…
Energy-Aware Agentic Orchestration for Multi-Site Service Deployment
Federal University of Viçosa (UFV)（维索萨联邦大学）；Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU)（乌贝兰迪亚联邦大学）；Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究所）；Universidade de Aveiro (UA)（阿威罗大学）；University of São Paulo (USP)（圣保罗大学）；Universitat Politecnica de València (UPV)（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；University of Minho (UMinho)（米尼奥大学）
Performance unpredictability is a major roadblock towards cloud adoption, and has performance, cost, and revenue ramifications. Predictable performance is even more critical as cloud services transition from monolithic designs to microservices. Detecting QoS violations after they occur in systems with microservices results in long recovery times, as hotspots propagate and amplify across dependent services. We present Seer, an online cloud performance debugging system that leverages deep learning and the massive amount of tracing data cloud systems collect to learn spatial and temporal patterns…
Microservice-based architecture has become prevalent for cloud-native applications. With an increasing number of applications being deployed on cloud platforms every day leveraging this architecture, more research efforts are required to understand how different strategies can be applied to effectively manage various cloud resources at scale. A large body of research has deployed automatic resource allocation algorithms using reactive and proactive autoscaling policies. However, there is still a gap in the efficiency of current algorithms in capturing the important features of microservices fr…
Internet of Things (IoT) has already proven to be the building block for next-generation Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). The considerable amount of data generated by the IoT devices needs latency-sensitive processing, which is not feasible by deploying the respective applications in remote Cloud datacentres. Edge/Fog computing, a promising extension of Cloud at the IoT-proximate network, can meet such requirements for smart CPSs. However, the structural and operational differences of Edge/Fog infrastructure resist employing Cloud-based service regulations directly to these environments. As a re…
Managing the energy consumption of the built environment is an important source of flexible load and decarbonization, enabling building managers and utilities to schedule consumption to avoid costly demand charges and peak times when carbon emissions from grid generated electricity are highest. A key technology component in building energy management is the building energy management system. Eclipse VOLTTRON is a legacy software platform which enables building energy management. It was developed for the US Department of Energy (DOE) at Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL) written in Python a…
