Trace analysis based microservice architecture measurement

Microservice architecture design highly relies on expert experience and may often result in improper service decomposition. Moreover, a microservice architecture is likely to degrade with the continuous evolution of services. Architecture measurement is thus important for the long-term evolution of microservice architectures. Due to the independent and dynamic nature of services, source code analysis based approaches cannot well capture the interactions between services. In this paper, we propose a trace analysis based microservice architecture measurement approach. We define a trace data model for microservice architecture measurement, which enables fine-grained analysis of the execution processes of requests and the interactions between interfaces and services. Based on the data model, we define 14 architectural metrics to measure the service independence and invocation chain complexity of a microservice system. We implement the approach and conduct three case studies with a student course project, an open-source microservice benchmark system, and three industrial microservice systems. The results show that our approach can well characterize the independence and invocation chain complexity of microservice architectures and help developers to identify microservice architecture issues caused by improper service decomposition and architecture degradation.