A model-driven approach for continuous performance engineering in microservice-based systems

Microservices are quite widely impacting on the software industry in recent years. Rapid evolution and continuous deployment represent specific benefits of microservice-based systems, but they may have a significant impact on non-functional properties like performance. Despite the obvious relevance of this property, there is still a lack of systematic approaches that explicitly take into account performance issues in the lifecycle of microservice-based systems. In such a context of evolution and re-deployment, Model-Driven Engineering techniques can provide major support to various software engineering activities, and in particular they can allow managing the relationships between a running system and its architectural model. In this paper, we propose a model-driven integrated approach that exploits traceability relationships between the monitored data of a microservice-based running system and its architectural model to derive recommended refactoring actions that lead to performance improvement. The approach has been applied and validated on two microservice-based systems, in the domain of e-commerce and ticket reservation, respectively, whose architectural models have been designed in UML profiled with MARTE.