Hybrelastic: a hybrid elasticity strategy with dynamic thresholds for microservice-based cloud applications

Microservices-based architectures aim to divide the application’s functionality into small services so that each one of them can be scaled, managed, implemented, and updated individually. Currently, more and more microservices are used in application modelling, making them compatible with resource elasticity. In the literature, solutions employ elasticity to improve application performance; however, most of them are based on CPU utilisation metrics and only on reactive elasticity. In this context, this article proposes the hybrelastic model, which combines reactive and proactive elasticity with dynamically calculated thresholds for CPU and network metrics. The article presents three contributions in the context of microservices: 1) combination of two elasticity policies; 2) use of more than one elasticity evaluation metric; 3) use of dynamic thresholds to trigger elasticity. Experiments with hybrelastic demonstrate 10.31% higher performance and 20.28% lower cost compared to other executions without hybrelastic. Copyright © 2024 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.