We would like to announce our 18th Software Performance Meetup. It will take place on March 19th 2019 and will be hosted by Interhyp AG.

Our first speaker, André van Hoorn of the University of Stuttgart, will talk about  “Efficient Resilience Benchmarking of Microservice Architectures”. In the second presentation, Bernhard Lubomski (RETIT GmbH) will provide an introduction to the distributed tracing system Jaeger:

Efficient Resilience Benchmarking of Microservice Architectures (André van Hoorn – University of Stuttgart)

The microservice architectural style is gaining more and more prevalence in the industry when designing complex, cloud-based distributed systems.
One of its guiding principles is design for failure, which means that a microservice is able to cope with failures of other microservices and its surrounding software/hardware infrastructure. This resilience is achieved by employing architectural resilience patterns such as circuit breaker and bulkhead, which have become core features of modern microservice technologies such as Hystrix, Kubernetes, and Istio.

Resilience benchmarking is a well-known method to assess failure tolerance mechanisms—for instance, via fault injection. Meanwhile, resilience benchmarking is not only conducted in testing environments, but also during a system’s production use. Current resilience benchmarking practices are ad-hoc and based on random fault injection.
For instance, the Simian Army shuts down or manipulates randomly selected (virtual) servers or data center regions. On the other hand, efficiency is one of the desired properties of fault injection, aiming to keep the number of experiments at an adequately low level to save time and costs. In this talk, we outline the vision and the current state of our ORCAS project for efficient resilience benchmarking of microservice architectures. The approach exploits knowledge about the relationship of resilience patterns, antipatterns, and suitable fault injections, as well as the system’s architecture to generate resilience experiments, combining simulations and testing/production-level benchmarks. ORCAS can be used to detect resilience antipatterns and to assess the effectiveness of present resilience patterns. The expected benefit is that the number of benchmarks to be executed against the real system are considerably reduced while achieving comparable or better benchmarking results.

Jaeger 101 (Bernhard Lubomski, RETIT GmbH)

The ongoing shift towards microservice applications in the IT industry renders observability of such applications by means of traditional tools increasingly difficult. A number of standards and applications have risen to the challenge. Among them is Jaeger, a distributed tracing system developed by Uber Technologies, which provides monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for microservice based distributed systems. We’ll introduce Jaeger and its underlying concepts, followed by a demonstration using a demo application. Using the demo application we will walk through the Jaeger UI and explore its capabilities.