Performance Engineering for Microservices: Research Challenges and Directions

Microservices complement approaches like DevOps and continuous delivery in terms of software architecture. Along with this architectural style, several important deployment technologies, such as container-based virtualization and container orchestration solutions, have emerged. These technologies allow to efficiently exploit cloud platforms, providing a high degree of scalability, availability, and portability for microservices. Despite the obvious importance of a sufficient level of performance, there is still a lack of performance engineering approaches explicitly taking into account the particularities of microservices. In this paper, we argue why new solutions to performance engineering for microservices are needed. Furthermore, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions with regard to performance-aware testing, monitoring, and modeling of microservices.