Engineering

Reliability engineering

Microservices

Service (business)

Downtime

Statistics

Maintainability

Upgrade

Operating system

Economics

Set (abstract data type)

Survivability

Computer science

Cloud computing

Visual arts

Distributed computing

Architecture

Computer network

Software

Mathematics

Architectural style

High availability

Software engineering

Economy

Programming language

Flexibility (engineering)

Code refactoring

Microservices represent a new architectural style where small and loosely coupled modules can be developed and deployed independently to compose an application. This architectural style brings various benefits such as maintainability and flexibility in scaling and aims at decreasing downtime in case of failure or upgrade. One of the enablers is Kubernetes, an open source platform that provides mechanisms for deploying, maintaining, and scaling containerized applications across a cluster of hosts. Moreover, Kubernetes enables healing through failure recovery actions to improve the availability of applications. As our ultimate goal is to devise architectures to enable high availability (HA) with Kubernetes for microservice based applications, in this paper we examine the availability achievable through Kubernetes under its default configuration. We have conducted a set of experiments which show that the service outage can be significantly higher than expected.

Deploying Microservice Based Applications with Kubernetes: Experiments and Lessons Learned