Understanding Container-Based Services Under Software Aging: Dependability and Performance Views

Container technology, as the key enabler behind microservice architectures, is widely applied in Cloud and Edge Computing. A long and continuous running of operating system (OS) hosting container-based services can encounter software aging that leads to performance deterioration and even causes system failures. OS rejuvenation techniques can mitigate the impact of software aging but the rejuvenation trigger interval needs to be carefully determined to reduce the downtime cost due to rejuvenation. This paper proposes a comprehensive semi-Markov-based approach to quantitatively evaluate the effect of OS rejuvenation on the dependability and the performance of a container-based service. In contrast to the existing studies, we neither restrict the distributions of time intervals of events to be exponential nor assume that backup resources are always available. Through the numerical study, we show the optimal container-migration trigger intervals that can maximize the dependability or minimize the performance of a container-based service.