BSN-OCF: Businesses Sink Node-Oriented Cascading Failure Model in Microservice Applications

Thousands of service units interact through dependency chains in the Microservice Application (MA) to handle various business functions. As a result, microservice applications feature complex interaction structures. Furthermore, these service units are distributed across multiple devices in the network, making them highly susceptible to cascading failures from single points of failure. Considerable efforts have been made to address and mitigate the significant risks posed by cascading failures. However, as an emerging network architecture, microservices have not yet been fully studied in terms of cascading failure modeling specific to microservice applications. This paper leverages the characteristics of the MA and proposes the Business Sink Node-Oriented Cascading Failure (BSN-OCF) model. The model extracts the network and application layers to describe the MA and models the load and capacity of service units and physical devices. The concept of a business sink node is introduced to address the challenge of directly calculating load. Furthermore, the Assessment Method of Structural Loss (AMSL) is proposed to quantify the vulnerability of the MA. This method overcomes the limitations of previous approaches, which focused solely on the loss of topology. Experiments and results validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. This work provides a self-assessment method for the MA and offers valuable support for optimizing its deployment structure in the future.