Verification in the Age of Microservices

Many large applications are now built using collections of microservices, each of which is deployed in isolated containers and which interact with each other through the use of remote procedure calls (RPCs). The use of microservices improves scalability -- each component of an application can be scaled independently -- and deployability. However, such applications are inherently distributed and current tools do not provide mechanisms to reason about and ensure their global behavior. In this paper we argue that recent advances in formal methods and software packet processing pave the path towards building mechanisms that can ensure correctness for such systems, both when they are being built and at runtime. These techniques impose minimal runtime overheads and are amenable to production deployments.