Investigation of stateful microservice availability during failover

Abstract

Deployment of light weight of containers enables a high degree of flexibility and velocity. However, not all benefits of containers apply to stateful microservices. While the maintainability of stateful micro services running in orchestrated container environments is high, it makes a more prominent impact on availability compared to stateless microservices. A more precise SLO and availability budget can be set when knowing the impact of maintenance on the availability. This research aims to investigate stateful microservice availability rate during failover, and to identify factors that make a significant impact on availability in an orchestrated container environment. An experiment was performed to evaluate how load intensity, load balancer type, request length, and connection type impact the availability of a database cluster during failover.