Invenio

Abstract

Microservices enable rapid service deployment and scaling. Integrating poorly-understood microservice components into Service Function Chains (SFCs) or graphs limits a provider's control over service delivery latency, however. Orchestration frameworks currently instantiate and place myriads of microservice components without knowing the impact of placement decisions on latency. In this paper, we explore challenges that service providers encounter in managing complex SFCs, and propose Invenio to empower providers to effectively place microservices without prior knowledge of service functionality. Invenio correlates user actions with procedure messages in network traces, and computes procedural affinity of communication among microservices for each user action. The procedural affinity values can then be used to make placement decisions to meet latency constraints of individual user actions. Our experiments with two microservice-based cellular network implementations demonstrate that placement with Invenio-computed affinity values significantly reduces failures by bounding message processing latency, resulting in up to 21% performance gain compared to message count-based placement algorithms, and up to 51% gain over default placement.