Hexagon: Generating Asynchronous Microservices Benchmarks for the Evaluation of Anomaly Propagation Resistance

Microservices architecture, while fostering scalability and maintainability, introduces difficulties in anomaly detection and root cause analysis due to its distributed nature. Numerous methods have been proposed to tackle this problem by incorporating automation into the recovery process. However, these methods often lack proper evaluation due to the limitations of current benchmarks, which are typically bound by synchronous communication and lack real-world complexity. To address this gap, this study proposes Hexagon, an open-source toolkit for generating asynchronous benchmark microservices with configurable complexity, specifically focusing on interaction patterns. Hexagon provides insights into how asynchronous communication within microservices influences their resilience against anomaly propagation, allowing the evaluation of microservice compositions based on their ease of recovery. An exploratory experiment demonstrates the impact of asynchronous communication on anomaly propagation patterns, highlighting the need for such realistic benchmarks in this domain.