Fast and Efficient What-If Analyses of Invocation Overhead and Transactional Boundaries to Support the Migration to Microservices

2025-01-30

AI Summary

To address performance overhead escalation and transaction boundary degradation arising from process decomposition during monolith-to-microservices migration, this paper proposes a lightweight, trace-based what-if analysis method. The approach comprises three stages: execution trace collection and rewriting, performance-sensitive call-chain simulation, and abstract modeling of transaction boundaries—enabling rapid, quantitative assessment of non-functional property changes induced by service decomposition alternatives. Its core innovation lies in introducing the first trace-rewriting analysis paradigm prioritizing usability and speed, requiring neither source-code modification nor deployment in production-like environments. Evaluated on industrial case studies, the method completes each scenario assessment in seconds—achieving two orders-of-magnitude improvement in analysis efficiency—and thereby significantly facilitates high-frequency, low-friction iteration over service boundaries and informed trade-off decisions.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Plan Execution and Monitoring
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution

Abstract

Improving agility and maintainability are common drivers for companies to adopt a microservice architecture for their existing software systems. However, the existing software often relies heavily on the fact that it is executed within a single process space. Therefore, decomposing existing software into out-of-process components like microservices can have a severe impact on non-functional properties, such as overall performance due to invocation overhead or data consistency. To minimize this impact, it is important to consider non-functional properties already as part of the design process of the service boundaries. A useful method for such considerations are what-if analyses, which allow to explore different scenarios and to develop the service boundaries in an iterative and incremental way. Experience from an industrial case study suggests that for these analyses, ease of use and speed tend to be more important than precision. In this paper, we present emerging results for an approach for what-if analyses based on trace rewriting that is (i) specifically designed for analyzing the impact on non-functional properties due to decomposition into out-of-process components and (ii) deliberately prefers ease of use and analysis speed over precision of the results.

Problem

• Microservices Conversion
• Performance Prediction
• Data Accuracy

Innovation

• Microservices Transformation
• Performance Analysis
• Data Accuracy Assessment