  Microservice architecture has transformed the way developers are building and
deploying applications in the nowadays cloud computing centers. This new
approach provides increased scalability, flexibility, manageability, and
performance while reducing the complexity of the whole software development
life cycle. The increase in cloud resource utilization also benefits
microservice providers. Various microservice platforms have emerged to
facilitate the DevOps of containerized services by enabling continuous
integration and delivery. Microservice platforms deploy application containers
on virtual or physical machines provided by public/private cloud
infrastructures in a seamless manner. In this paper, we study and evaluate the
provisioning performance of microservice platforms by incorporating the details
of all layers (i.e., both micro and macro layers) in the modelling process. To
this end, we first build a microservice platform on top of Amazon EC2 cloud and
then leverage it to develop a comprehensive performance model to perform
what-if analysis and capacity planning for microservice platforms at scale. In
other words, the proposed performance model provides a systematic approach to
measure the elasticity of the microservice platform by analyzing the
provisioning performance at both the microservice platform and the back-end
macroservice infrastructures.
