Paper ID: 2303.15490

Research on Efficiency Analysis of Microservices

Abel C. H. Chen

With the maturity of web services, containers, and cloud computing technologies, large services in traditional systems (e.g. the computation services of machine learning and artificial intelligence) are gradually being broken down into many microservices to increase service reusability and flexibility. Therefore, this study proposes an efficiency analysis framework based on queuing models to analyze the efficiency difference of breaking down traditional large services into n microservices. For generalization, this study considers different service time distributions (e.g. exponential distribution of service time and fixed service time) and explores the system efficiency in the worst-case and best-case scenarios through queuing models (i.e. M/M/1 queuing model and M/D/1 queuing model). In each experiment, it was shown that the total time required for the original large service was higher than that required for breaking it down into multiple microservices, so breaking it down into multiple microservices can improve system efficiency. It can also be observed that in the best-case scenario, the improvement effect becomes more significant with an increase in arrival rate. However, in the worst-case scenario, only slight improvement was achieved. This study found that breaking down into multiple microservices can effectively improve system efficiency and proved that when the computation time of the large service is evenly distributed among multiple microservices, the best improvement effect can be achieved. Therefore, this study's findings can serve as a reference guide for future development of microservice architecture.

Submitted: Mar 21, 2023