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Performance Impact of Microservice Granularity Decisions: An Empirical Evaluation Using the Service Weaver Framework

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Software Architecture (ECSA 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14889))

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Abstract

The Service Weaver framework enables the development of distributed applications in Go as modular monoliths, with the flexibility to deploy monolith components in different environments and at various levels of granularity without code changes. This work evaluates the performance of an open-source microservice application using Service Weaver, considering multiple service granularity decisions in environments of one and two virtual machines under various workloads. The results indicate that service decoupling, while beneficial to modularity and maintenance, can significantly increase communication overhead between processes and virtual machines, negatively affecting the application’s performance and scalability. These findings highlight the importance of balancing service granularity and communication costs in the design and deployment of microservice applications.

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Data Availability Statement

To facilitate reproduction and potential extension of this work by the research community, all experimental artifacts and data generated are publicly available at https://github.com/mendoncas/granularity-evaluation/.

Notes

  1. 1.

    When using the Kubernetes deployer, Service Weaver creates a separate Deployment specification for each group of co-located components specified in the application’s configuration file [6].

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Acknowledgments

The generative AI tools ChatGPT-4 Turbo and GitHub Copilot were used to assist in structuring and revising this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center of Technological Sciences, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil

    Ricardo César Mendonça Filho

  2. Post Graduate Program in Applied InformaticsUniversity of Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil

    Nabor C. Mendonça

Authors
  1. Ricardo César Mendonça Filho
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  2. Nabor C. Mendonça
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nabor C. Mendonça .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Matthias Galster

  2. University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

    Patrizia Scandurra

  3. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Tommi Mikkonen

  4. Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Pablo Oliveira Antonino

  5. University of São Paulo, São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil

    Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

  6. University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain

    Elena Navarro

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Mendonça Filho, R.C., Mendonça, N.C. (2024). Performance Impact of Microservice Granularity Decisions: An Empirical Evaluation Using the Service Weaver Framework. In: Galster, M., Scandurra, P., Mikkonen, T., Oliveira Antonino, P., Nakagawa, E.Y., Navarro, E. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14889. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70797-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70797-1_13

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