A review of microservices autoscaling with formal verification perspective

Abstract

The process of scaling microservices is a challenging task, especially in maintaining optimum resource provisioning while respecting QoS constraints and SLA.Many research works have proposed autoscaling approaches for microservices, however, less likely concerned with the correctness guarantee of the proposed algorithms. Hence, it is significant to gather and summarize these approaches to foster future innovation. Meanwhile, a few reviews have been published concerning microservices from different aspects. Therefore, our review complements the existing by focusing on autoscaling with verification perspectives. This study highlights the recent contributions in three inter-related main topics that were published within the year 2017 to 2022, namely, microservice, verification, and autoscaling. Due to limited resources on verification for microservice autoscaling, we widen the perspective by considering the verification for autoscaling in cloud-based systems. Based on our findings, we found that the formal method is not a new thing in verifying the autoscaling policies in cloud-based systems, and one recent study that implements the formal method in the microservices area has been identified. Apart from the autoscaling techniques, we have also determined several factors that have been a concern in scaling the microservices as well as the relatable metrics. Meanwhile, from a verification perspective, we identified that probabilistic model checking is the common formal verification technique used to verify microservices and cloud autoscaling. Finally, we recommend open challenges from two perspectives which highlight the verification for existing microservice autoscaling and verification for ML-based microservice autoscaling.

Energy Consumption in Microservices Architectures: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The methodology for the systematic review employed in 202 this investigation draws inspiration from [34]. As depicted 203 in Figure 1, the research methodology encompasses several [25] 2017 Microservices Context/practical motivations/tools Systematic mapping [26] 2018 State of practice and collect challenges in microservices Challenges/Solutions Survey [27] 2018 Microservices in Practice Context Survey [28] 2018 Industrial application of microservices Context Systematic Review [29] 2019 Services communication of Microservices Security problems Survey [30] 2019 Architecting with Microservices Context/problems Systematic mapping [31] 2020 Microservices Architecture in DevOps Methods / Design Patterns / Quality Attribute / Tools Systematic mapping [32] 2021 Security in microservice architectures Security threats/techniques and tools Systematic mapping [33] 2022 The subsequent phase focuses on the search process. During this stage, a specific search term was used in five distinct search engines to gather relevant papers.…”

“…The scholarly work of Hannousse et al [32] unfolds as a systematic mapping study on the security aspects of microservices and architectures predicated on microservices. Jawaddi et al [33] spotlight the leading approaches towards self-scaling microservices, along with the instruments and formal verification techniques deployed to ascertain their efficacy.…”

Cloud Elasticity of Microservices-based Applications: A Survey

“…Among existing surveys handling elasticity [14][15][16][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], we consider that the taxonomy presented in [13] is the most consistent one as it considers the largest number of relevant criteria. Despite the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy presented in [13], it lacks certain criteria, such as the ones related to the scope, purpose, trigger, actions as well as others related to analysis and resource allocation strategies.…”

“…In fact, container technology, deployed in microservice applications, displays the new trend in lightweight visualization. However, as far as we know, despite the emergence of miroservice development style and its large deployment using containers, only a few surveys [14][15][16] have addressed microservice elasticity. Unfortunately, these surveys are displaying a basic overview of such architecture without a deep focus on microservice characteristics.…”

Autoscaling in Serverless Computing : Taxonomy and OpenChallenges

“…Moreover, a review has discussed the integration of probabilistic model checking with autoscaling [69]. This approach can be adapted to the serverless computing approach and provides an additional layer of reliability.…”