Online Marketplace: A Benchmark for Data Management in Microservices
Rodrigo Laigner, Zhexiang Zhang, Yijian Liu, Leonardo Freitas Gomes, Yongluan Zhou
TL;DR
This paper addresses the data management gaps in microservice applications by introducing the Online Marketplace benchmark, which targets core challenges such as distributed transactions, replication, consistent querying, event processing, and cross-service data integrity. It defines a comprehensive workload, a family of data management criteria, and a driver to generate online, coherent inputs, enabling fair comparisons across platforms. Through case studies on Orleans, Statefun, and a composite solution, the authors demonstrate the benchmark’s ability to stress realistic microservice deployments, reveal architectural bottlenecks, and yield actionable design decisions for future data systems. The work has practical impact by offering a testbed for evaluating state management, replication semantics, and event-driven workflows in cloud-native architectures, guiding researchers and practitioners toward more robust, scalable, and consistent microservice platforms.
Abstract
Microservice architectures have become a popular approach for designing scalable distributed applications. Despite their extensive use in industrial settings for over a decade, there is limited understanding of the data management challenges that arise in these applications. Consequently, it has been difficult to advance data system technologies that effectively support microservice applications. To fill this gap, we present Online Marketplace, a microservice benchmark that highlights core data management challenges that existing benchmarks fail to address. These challenges include transaction processing, query processing, event processing, constraint enforcement, and data replication. We have defined criteria for various data management issues to enable proper comparison across data systems and platforms. Through case studies with state-of-the-art data platforms, we discuss the issues encountered while implementing and meeting Online Marketplace's criteria. By capturing the overhead of meeting the key data management requirements that are overlooked by existing benchmarks, we gain actionable insights into the experimental platforms. This highlights the significance of Online Marketplace in advancing future data systems to meet the needs of microservice practitioners.