Cloud software performance metrics collection and aggregation for auto-scaling module

Abstract

Cloud computing made a big impact on software architecture evolution. The demand to serve multiple tenants, to include continuous delivery practice into the development process as well as increased system load influenced the style of cloud based software architecture. Microservice architecture is preferred architecture despite its complexity when scalability is an essential attribute of quality of service. Microservices should be managed, i.e., hardware resources should be adjusted based on application load, as well as resiliency should be ensured. Popular IaaS and PaaS providers such as Amazon, Azure or OpenStack ensure auto-scaling and elasticity at the infrastructure level. This approach has the following limitations: (1) Scaling and resiliency is a part of the infrastructure and not emerging from application nature; (2) The software is locked in with a specific vendor; (3) It might be difficult to run and ensure smooth scalability by running software on different vendors at the same time. We are creating auto-scaling module for microservice-based applications. Collecting metrics both at infrastructure and application levels is one important task for auto-scaling. We’ve chosen to investigate ELK stack and build appropriate architecture around it.