Microns: Connection Subsetting for Microservices in Shared Clusters

Microservice applications typically employ a technique known as connection subsetting to ensure resource-efficient and stable communication with persistent connections. However, the interdependency in microservice applications and complex runtime environments pose significant challenges for effective connection subsetting, rendering traditional strategies notably inefficient. In this paper, we present Microns, a connection subsetting framework designed for microservices in shared clusters. At the application level, Microns effectively handles the complex call dependencies in applications and meticulously determines the number of connections maintained by each pair of dependent microservices. At the microservice level, Microns manages the connection relationships between dependent containers according to their respective contributions to end-to-end latency. Experiments across microservice benchmarks demonstrate that Microns achieves a significant reduction on end-to-end latency by over 74.4%.