HydraGen: A Microservice Benchmark Generator

Microservice-based architectures have become ubiq-uitous in large-scale software systems. Experimental cloud re-searchers constantly propose enhanced resource management mechanisms for such systems. These mechanisms need to be eval-uated using both realistic and flexible microservice benchmarks to study in which ways diverse application characteristics can affect their performance and scalability. However, current mi-croservice benchmarks have limitations including static compu-tational complexity, limited architectural scale, and fixed topology (i.e., number of tiers, fan-in, and fan-out characteristics). We therefore propose HydraGen, a tool that enables re-searchers to systematically generate benchmarks with different computational complexities and topologies, to tackle experimental evaluation of performance at scale for web-serving applications, with a focus on inter-service communication. To illustrate the potential of our open-source tool, we demonstrate how it can reproduce an existing microservice benchmark with preserved architectural properties. We also demonstrate how HydraGen can enrich the evaluation of cloud management systems based on a case study related to traffic engineering.