Enabling a highly-scalable, cloud-based microservices architecture

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The goals of this research are to design, build and evaluate mechanisms that enable a highly-scalable, cloud-based microservices architecture to support future, cloud-based enterprise applications. Here, enterprise applications will be instances of microservices architectures that are comprised of many services. The future scale of operation will measure hundreds of thousands of service instances.Cloud customers desire infinite computing needs for their applications but cloud provides have finite computing resources to work with. It is not uncommon that data centers are reaching their physical limitations in terms of space and operating cost. Today, the pragmatic solution applied by cloud providers to satisfy high-value customers is to provide them with dedicated, highly expensive, and powerful hardware, while other hardware resources remain heavily shared among other customers. However, computing needs of customers, whether high-value or other, are often over-stated, either inadvertently or on purpose, such that expensive physical resources may sit around idle at times, while other close by resources in the same data center are pushed to their limits. Also, not all hosted applications are expected to experience peak load at all times, such that some degree of physical resource over-provisioning is possible.In our approach services will be encapsulated in containers. Containers are lightweight virtual machines. They offer isolation, fast on demand start-up, and live migration, at a low resource footprint, as compared to their heavier weight virtual machine counterparts. Our approach will leverage novel hybrid scaling techniques that dynamically scale the compute, networking and storage resources of containers up and down in order to meet the performance expectations expressed by customers on their applications, while minimizing physical resource usage for the cloud provider.