Enabling Containerized, Parametric and Distributed Database Deployment and Benchmarking as a Service

Containerized environments introduce a set of performance challenges that require extensive measurements and benchmarking to identify and model application behavior regarding a variety of parameters. Databases present extra challenges given their extensive need for synchronization and orchestration of a benchmark run, especially in microservice-oriented technologies (such as container platforms) and dynamic business models such as DBaaS. In this work we describe the adaptation of our open source, baseline load injection as a service tool, Flexibench, in order to enable the automated, parametric launching and measurement of containerized and distributed databases as a service. Adaptation and synchronization needs are described for ensuring test sequence and applied through a case study on MySQL. Therefore a performance engineer can directly test selected configuration and performance of a database in a given target workload with simple REST invocations. Experimentation starts from adapting the official MySQL docker images as well as OLTP Bench Client ones and investigates scenarios such as parameter sweep experiments and co-allocation scenarios where multiple DB instances are sharing physical nodes, as expected in the DBaaS paradigm.