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_posts/2023-11-29-blueprint.md

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+---
+title:  "Blueprint: A Toolchain for Highly-Reconfigurable Microservices"
+layout: post
+---
+
+Research Question(s): How to easily reconfigure microservice
+applications for 1) update microservices design, 2) reproduce emergent
+phenomena in microservices and
+3) prototype and evaluate solutions for microservices.
+
+Key Contributions: Hard to explore and standardize is the design space
+of microservice systems, yet point solutions in such a vast design
+space are the norm in microservice benchmarks. Hence, the
+generalizability of research results derived from such benchmarks is
+questionable. Additionally, microservice implementations tightly
+couple concerns at source-code level, so a slight alteration of design
+requires a lot of efforts (hundreds to thousands of lines of code). 
+
+Blueprint’s key insight is that the design of a microservice
+application can be decoupled into three almost independent layers  (i)
+the application level workflow that defines APIs used by
+microservices, (ii) the underlying scaffolding components such as
+replication and auto-scaling frameworks, communication libraries, and
+storage backends , and (iii) the concrete instantiations of those
+components and their configuration. Using this insight, Blueprint
+compiler first takes three inputs, workflow spec, wiring spec, and
+compiler plugins, and generates an intermediate representation(IR). An
+IR is a structured graph specifying the services, and scaffolding
+(e.g. distributed tracing), and instantiation granularity (e.g. Linux
+Process and Docker Container). The compiler then uses the IR to
+generate runnable microservice applications. Using Blueprint, a
+researcher can change the design of a microservice by simply updating
+one or more of workflow spec, wiring spec and compiler plugins. 
+
+Blueprint is able to reduce the number of lines of code for
+implementing a microservice benchmark by 5-7X. The lines of code
+required for changing a design choice has 17X reduction. Blueprint can
+reproduce emergent phenomena like metastable failures and cross-system
+inconsistency by 3-4 lines of code in the wiring spec. Blueprint can
+generate runnable small to medium sized microservice applications
+within seconds (1-3 sec). 
+
+
+Opportunities for future work:  1) Debugging generated code and
+runnable systems can be challenging. 2) Currently, Blueprint generates
+services only in Go. More compiler plug-ins in the future may support
+other programming languages. 3) The abstractions Blueprint are great
+for reconfiguring applications, but at the cost of potentially
+performance optimizations. This performance tax may make Blueprint not
+suitable for generating production-ready microservice applications. 
+
+
+Presenter: Max Liu
+

schedule.html

@@ -139,6 +139,11 @@
       <td>Zhaoqi Zhang</td>
       <td><a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3452296.3472888">Understanding host network stack overheads</a></td>
     </tr>
+    <tr>
+      <td>11/29/23</td>
+      <td>Max Liu</td>
+      <td><a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3600006.3613138">Blueprint: A Toolchain for Highly-Reconfigurable Microservices</a></td>
+    </tr>
 </table>
   </div>
 </body>