Benchmarks and performance metrics for assessing the migration to microservice-based architectures

Abstract

The migration from monolithic to microservice-based systems have become increasingly popular in the last decade. However, the advantages of this type of migration have not been extensively investigated in the literature, to the best of the authors' knowledge. This paper aims to present a methodology and performance indicators to support better assessment on whether the migration from a monolithic to microservice-based architecture is beneficial. A systematic review was conducted to identify the most relevant performance metrics in the literature, validated in a survey with professionals from the industry. Next, this set of metrics, including latency, throughput, scalability, CPU, memory usage, and network utilization - were used in two experiments to evaluate monolithic and microservice versions of the same system. The results reported here contribute to the body of knowledge on benchmarking different software architectures. In addition, this study illustrates how the identified metrics can more precisely assess both monolithic and microservice systems.