Optimizing Service Placement for Microservice Architecture in Clouds

As microservice architecture is becoming more popular than ever, developers intend to transform traditional monolithic applications into service-based applications (composed by a number of services). To deploy a service-based application in clouds, besides the resource demands of each service, the traffic demands between collaborative services are crucial for the overall performance. Poor handling of the traffic demands can result in severe performance degradation, such as high response time and jitter. However, current cluster schedulers fail to place services at the best possible machine, since they only consider the resource constraints but ignore the traffic demands between services. To address this problem, we propose a new approach to optimize the placement of service-based applications in clouds. The approach first partitions the application into several parts while keeping overall traffic between different parts to a minimum and then carefully packs the different parts into machines with respect to their resource demands and traffic demands. We implement a prototype scheduler and evaluate it with extensive experiments on testbed clusters. The results show that our approach outperforms existing container cluster schedulers and representative heuristics, leading to much less overall inter-machine traffic. View Full-Tex