An architecture to automate performance tests on microservices

Abstract

The microservices architecture provides a new approach to develop applications. As opposed to monolithic applications, in which the application comprises a single software artifact, an application based on the microservices architecture is composed by a set of services, each one designed to perform a single and well-defined task. These services allow the development team to decouple several parts of the application using different frameworks, languages and hardware for each part of the system. One of the drawbacks for adopting the microservices architecture to develop applications is testability. In a single application test boundaries can be more easily established and tend to be more stable as the application evolves, while with microservices we can have a set of hundreds of services that operate together and are prone to change more rapidly. Each one of these services needs to be tested and updated as the service changes. In addition, the different characteristics of these services such as languages, frameworks or the used infrastructure have to be considered in the testing phase. Performance tests are applied to assure that a particular software complies with a set of non-functional requirements such as throughput and response time. These metrics are important to ensure that business constraints are respected and to help finding performance bottlenecks. In this paper, we present a new approach to allow the performance tests to be executed in an automated way, with each microservice providing a test specification that is used to perform tests. Along with the architecture, we also provide a framework that implements some key concepts of this architecture. This framework is available as an open source project1.