Kubernetes-in-the-Loop: Enriching Microservice Simulation Through Authentic Container Orchestration

Microservices deployed and managed by container orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes are the bases of modern cloud applications. In microservice performance modeling and prediction, simulations provide a lightweight alternative to experimental analysis, which requires dedicated infrastructure and a laborious setup. However, existing simulators cannot run realistic scenarios, as performance-critical orchestration mechanisms (like scheduling or autoscaling) are manually modeled and can consequently not be represented in their full complexity and configuration space. This work combines a state-of-the-art simulation for microservice performance with Kubernetes container orchestration. Hereby, we include the original implementation of Kubernetes artifacts enabling realistic scenarios and testing of orchestration policies with low overhead. In two experiments with Kubernetes' kube-scheduler and cluster-autoscaler, we demonstrate that our framework can correctly handle different configurations of these orchestration mechanisms boosting both the simulation's use cases and authenticity.