A framework for satisfying the performance requirements of containerized software systems through multi-versioning

Abstract

With the increasing popularity and complexity of containerized software systems, satisfying the performance requirements of these systems becomes more challenging as well. While a common remedy to this problem is to increase the allocated amount of resources by scaling up or out, this remedy is not necessarily cost-effective and, therefore, often problematic for smaller companies. In this paper, we study an alternative, more cost-effective approach for satisfying the performance requirements of containerized software systems. In particular, we investigate how we can satisfy such requirements by applying software multi-versioning to the system's resource-heavy containers. We present DockerMV, an open-source extension of the Docker framework, to support the multi-versioning of containerized software systems. We demonstrate the efficacy of multi-versioning for satisfying the performance requirements of containerized software systems through experiments on the TeaStore, a microservice reference test application, and Znn, a containerized news portal application. Our DockerMV extension can be used by software developers to introduce multi-versioning in their own containerized software systems, thereby better allowing them to meet the performance requirements of their systems. © 2020 ACM.