The applicability of palladio for assessing the quality of cloud-based microservice architectures

When adopting microservices, software architects have to make several design decisions which impact the quality of the application in terms of scalability, elasticity and cost-efficiency. A prominent model-driven architectural simulator that aids software architects in analysing and predicting the quality of their architecture is Palladio. There is active work on extending Palladio to support new needs, however, there is lack of evidence for its applicability in the context of microservice architectures. Therefore, we conduct a case study at a partner company where we apply Palladio to analyse the performance as well as to assess scalability, elasticity and cost-efficiency aspects of a cloud-based microservice application. In this work, we highlight some of the results which show that Palladio is able to predict the application performance with a sufficient accuracy. However, when assessing scalability, elasticity and cost-efficiency the applicability of Palladio comes with several workarounds and not automated for all the chosen scenarios.