3MileBeach: A Tracer with Teeth

We present 3MILEBEACH, a tracing and fault injection platform designed for microservice-based architectures. 3MILE-BEACH interposes on the message serialization libraries that are ubiquitous in this environment, avoiding the application code instrumentation that tracing and fault injection infrastructures typically require. 3MILEBEACH provides messagelevel distributed tracing at less than 50% of the overhead of the state-of-the-art tracing frameworks, and fault injection that allows higher precision experiments than existing solutions. We measure the overhead of 3MILEBEACH as a tracer and its efficacy as a fault injector. We qualitatively measure its promise as a platform for tuning and debugging by sharing concrete use cases in the context of bottleneck identification, performance tuning, and bug finding. Finally, we use 3MILEBEACH to perform a novel type of fault injection - Temporal Fault Injection (TFI), which more precisely controls individual inter-service message flow with temporal prerequisites, and makes it possible to catch an entirely new class of fault tolerance bugs.