A configurable method for benchmarking scalability of cloud-native applications

Abstract

Cloud-native applications constitute a recent trend for designing large-scale software systems. However, even though several cloud-native tools and patterns have emerged to support scalability, there is no commonly accepted method to empirically benchmark their scalability. In this study, we present a benchmarking method, allowing researchers and practitioners to conduct empirical scalability evaluations of cloud-native applications, frameworks, and deployment options. Our benchmarking method consists of scalability metrics, measurement methods, and an architecture for a scalability benchmarking tool, particularly suited for cloud-native applications. Following fundamental scalability definitions and established benchmarking best practices, we propose to quantify scalability by performing isolated experiments for different load and resource combinations, which asses whether specified service level objectives (SLOs) are achieved. To balance usability and reproducibility, our benchmarking method provides configuration options, controlling the trade-off between overall execution time and statistical grounding. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation of our method’s configuration options for the special case of event-driven microservices. For this purpose, we use benchmark implementations of the two stream processing frameworks Kafka Streams and Flink and run our experiments in two public clouds and one private cloud. We find that, independent of the cloud platform, it only takes a few repetitions (≤ 5) and short execution times (≤ 5 minutes) to assess whether SLOs are achieved. Combined with our findings from evaluating different search strategies, we conclude that our method allows to benchmark scalability in reasonable time.