Procedure-driven deployment support for the microservice era

In this work, we examine the challenges that service providers encounter in managing complex service function graphs, while controlling service delivery latency. Based on the lessons we learn, we outline the design of a new system, Invenio, that empowers providers to effectively place microservices without prior knowledge of service functionality. Invenio correlates user actions with the messages they trigger seen in network traces, and computes procedural affinity for 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. Preliminary experiments with the Clearwater IP Multimedia Subsystem demonstrate that even a single high-latency link can result in significant performance degradation, and placement with Invenio can increase user quality of experience.