[Colloquium] 11/8 Raja Sambasivan (Tufts University) Toward understanding and efficiently observing microservices

[Tracey Walton]

Department of Computer Sciences Seminar

Raja Sambasivan
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Tufts University

Wednesday, November 8th
11:30am - 12:30pm
In-Person: John Crerar Library 390

Title: Toward understanding and efficiently observing microservices

Abstract:
The microservices architecture is a commonly used paradigm for building distributed applications. Many small software services, each providing different functionalities, interact to provide high-level application behaviors. This paradigm has many benefits: it enables fine-grained scaling, it facilitates’ development teams’ independence, and it aligns with the breakdown of Moore’s law, which incentivizes smaller compute units. Unfortunately, it also has one well-known drawback—understandability or observability. End-to-end behaviors in microservices applications are very challenging to reason about because they result from myriad interactions within and among services. Though there is opportunity for research to help, a lack of real-world data about microservice deployments depresses opportunities to provide value.

In this talk, I will discuss our efforts to characterize a large cloud providers’ microservice deployment. I will also discuss one key challenge our studies revealed—the tension between the desire for deep observability and immense instrumentation exhaust—and our efforts to address it via a framework that automatically chooses which logging points should be enabled at any time to provide visibility into performance problems.

Bio:
Raja is the Ankur and Mari Sahu Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University, where he works on debugging and management techniques for cloud-based applications.   In prior lives, he helped worked with the Massachusetts Open Cloud Project, studied routing-protocol evolvability, and worked on (what is now called) distributed tracing.



Tracey Walton
Business Assistant
University of Chicago
5730 South Ellis JCL 212
Tywalton615 at uchicago.edu
(773)702-0723

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