BigVM: A Multi-Layer-Microservice-Based Platform for Deploying SaaS

With the advent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), SaaS developers are facing many more challenges associated with multi-tenancy and dramatically increased number of users, e.g., scalability, availability, increased cost of development/testing/deployment, high cost of customization. As most of them are highly common, it is becoming very desirable if a generic and powerful deployment platform can be designed. For such a purpose, in this paper, a new platform namely BigVM is proposed to isolate SaaS developers from deployments and bridge the gap between the best practices and the real-world adoptions.BigVM provides microservice-oriented deployment kits to enable SaaS developer to create, customize, and deploy SaaS solutions in a multi-layer-microservice-based manner, which can utilize fault tolerance, optimize the resources, and scale in/out the underlying resources not only based on resource utilization but also on the non-functional requirements from the system, e.g., timing constraint. A set of experiments are implemented in sysbench to test one of BigVM's core components—Docker containers. The results show that Docker containers can achieve desirable performance in terms of CPU workload and file I/O, thus laying a solid foundation for our future work.