Raja Sambasivan (Tufts University)- Toward understanding and efficiently observing microservices
The microservices architecture is a commonly used paradigm for building distributed applications. Many small software services, each providing different functionalities, interact to provide high-level application behaviors. This paradigm has many benefits: it enables fine-grained scaling, it facilitates’ development teams’ independence, and it aligns with the breakdown of Moore’s law, which incentivizes smaller compute units. Unfortunately, it also has one well-known drawback—understandability or observability. End-to-end behaviors in microservices applications are very challenging to reason about because they result from myriad interactions within and among services. Though there is opportunity for research to help, a lack of real-world data about microservice deployments depresses opportunities to provide value.
In this talk, I will discuss our efforts to characterize a large cloud providers’ microservice deployment. I will also discuss one key challenge our studies revealed—the tension between the desire for deep observability and immense instrumentation exhaust—and our efforts to address it via a framework that automatically chooses which logging points should be enabled at any time to provide visibility into performance problems.
Speakers
![](https://cs.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Image-6-250x250.jpeg)
Raja Sambasivan
Raja is the Ankur and Mari Sahu Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University, where he works on debugging and management techniques for cloud-based applications. In prior lives, he helped worked with the Massachusetts Open Cloud Project, studied routing-protocol evolvability, and worked on (what is now called) distributed tracing.