MSDBench: Understanding the Performance Impact of Isolation Domains on Microservice-Based IoT Deployments

We present MSDBench – a set of benchmarks designed to illuminate the effects of deployment choices and operating system abstractions on microservices performance in IoT settings. The microservices architecture has emerged as a mainstay set of design principles for cloud-hosted, network-facing applications. Their utility as a design pattern for “The Internet of Things” (IoT) is less well understood. We use MSDBench to show the performance impacts of different deployment choices and isolation domain assignments for Linux and Ambience, an experimental operating system specifically designed to support microservices for IoT. These results indicate that deployment choices can have a dramatic impact on microservices performance, and thus, MSDBench is a useful tool for developers and researchers in this space.