Orcas

The microservice architectural style is gaining more and more prevalence when constructing complex, distributed systems. One of its guiding principles is design for failure, which means that a microservice is able to cope with failures of other microservices and its surrounding software/hardware infrastructure. This is achieved by employing architectural patterns such as the circuit breaker and the bulkhead. Resilience benchmarking aims to assess failure tolerance mechanisms—for instance, via fault injection. Meanwhile, resilience benchmarking is not only conducted in development and staging environments, but also during a system’s production use. Existing resilience benchmarks for microservice architectures are ad-hoc and based on randomly injected faults.

The Orcas project aims for efficient resilience benchmarking of microservice architectures. Resilience vulnerabilities shall be detected more efficiently, i.e., faster and with fewer resources, by incorporating architectural knowledge as well as knowledge about the relationship between performance/capacity/stability (anti) patterns and suitable injections. The approach builds on existing works on model-based and measurement-based dependability evaluation of component-based software systems.

Dr.-Ing. Andre van Hoorn (PI/contact)

Orcas is sponsored by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung as part of the elite program for junior researchers.