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Long Live the Image: On Enabling Resilient Production Database Containers for Microservice Applications

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Raj Ranjan

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Abstract

IEEEMicroservices architecture advocates decentralized data ownership for building software systems. Particularly, in the Database per Service pattern, each microservice is supposed to maintain its own database and to handle the data related to its functionality. When implementing microservices in practice, however, there seems to be a paradox: The de facto technology (i.e., containerization) for microservice implementation is claimed to be unsuitable for the microservice component (i.e., database) in production environments, mainly due to the data persistence issues (e.g., dangling volumes) and security concerns. As a result, the existing discussions generally suggest replacing database containers with cloud database services, while leaving the on-premises microservice implementation out of consideration. After identifying three statelessness-dominant application scenarios, we proposed container-native data persistence as a conditional solution to enable resilient database containers in production. In essence, this data persistence solution distinguishes stateless data access (i.e., reading) from stateful data processing (i.e., creating, updating, and deleting), and thus it aims at the development of stateless microservices for suitable applications. In addition to developing our proposal, this research is particularly focused on its validation, via prototyping the solution and evaluating its performance, and via applying this solution to two real-world microservice applications. From the industrial perspective, the validation results have proved the feasibility, usability, and efficiency of fully containerized microservices for production in applicable situations. From the academic perspective, this research has shed light on the operation-side micro-optimization of individual microservices, which fundamentally expands the scope of “software micro-optimization” and reveals new research opportunities.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Li Z, Saldias-Vallejos N, Seco D, Rodriguez MA, Ranjan R

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Year: 2024

Pages: epub ahead of print

Online publication date: 01/08/2024

Acceptance date: 02/04/2018

ISSN (print): 0098-5589

ISSN (electronic): 1939-3520

Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2024.3436623

DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2024.3436623


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