Performance Evaluation of Microservices Architectures Using Containers

TLDR

Microservices architecture reduces complexity, scales easily, and improves flexibility and resilience, with containers providing lightweight, fast‑startup environments that support both monolithic and microservice deployments via master‑slave or nested‑container models. This study compares CPU and network benchmark performance between master‑slave and nested‑container microservice models to guide system designers.

Abstract

Microservices architecture has started a new trend for application development for a number of reasons: (1) to reduce complexity by using tiny services; (2) to scale, remove and deploy parts of the system easily; (3) to improve flexibility to use different frameworks and tools; (4) to increase the overall scalability; and (5) to improve the resilience of the system. Containers have empowered the usage of microservices architectures by being lightweight, providing fast start-up times, and having a low overhead. Containers can be used to develop applications based on monolithic architectures where the whole system runs inside a single container or inside a microservices architecture where one or few processes run inside the containers. Two models can be used to implement a microservices architecture using containers: master-slave, or nested-container. The goal of this work is to compare the performance of CPU and network running benchmarks in the two aforementioned models of microservices architecture hence provide a benchmark analysis guidance for system designers.