Cloud services have recently started undergoing a major shift from monolithic applications, to graphs of hundreds of loosely-coupled microservices. Microservices fundamentally change a lot of assumptions current cloud systems are designed with, and present both opportunities and challenges when optimizing for quality of service (QoS) and utilization. In this paper we explore the implications microservices have across the cloud system stack. We first present Death-StarBench, a novel, open-source benchmark suite built with microservices that is representative of large end-to-end services, modular and extensible. DeathStarBench includes a

Cloud services have recently undergone a shift from monolithic applications to microservices, with hundreds or thousands of loosely-coupled microservices comprising the end-to-end application. Microservices present both opportunities and challenges when optimizing for quality of service (QoS) and cloud utilization. In this paper we explore the implications cloud microservices have on system bottlenecks, and datacenter server design. We first present and characterize an end-to-end application built using tens of popular open-source microservices that implements a movie renting and streaming service, and is modular and extensible. We then use the end-to-end service to study the scalability and performance bottlenecks of microservices, and highlight implications they have on the design of datacenter hardware. Specifically, we revisit the long-standing debate of brawny versus wimpy cores in the context of microservices, we quantify the I-cache pressure they introduce, and measure the time spent in computation versus communication between microservices over RPCs. As more cloud applications switch to this new programming model, it is increasingly important to revisit the assumptions we have previously used to build and manage cloud systems.

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Performance unpredictability is a major roadblock towards cloud adoption, and has performance, cost, and revenue ramifications. Predictable performance is even more critical as cloud services transition from monolithic designs to microservices. Detecting QoS violations after they occur in systems with microservices results in long recovery times, as hotspots propagate and amplify across dependent services.We present Seer, an online cloud performance debugging system that leverages deep learning and the massive amount of tracing data cloud systems collect to learn spatial and temporal patterns that translate to QoS violations. Seer combines lightweight distributed RPC-level tracing, with detailed low-level hardware monitoring to signal an upcoming QoS violation, and diagnose the source of unpredictable performance. Once an imminent QoS violation is detected, Seer notifies the cluster manager to take action to avoid performance degradation altogether. We evaluate Seer both in local clusters, and in large-scale deployments of end-to-end applications built with microservices with hundreds of users. We show that Seer correctly anticipates QoS violations 91% of the time, and avoids the QoS violation to begin with in 84% of cases. Finally, we show that Seer can identify applicationlevel design bugs, and provide insights on how to better architect microservices to achieve predictable performance.

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