Root Cause and Liability Analysis in the Microservices Architecture for Edge IoT Services

In this work, we present a liability analysis framework for root cause analysis (RCA) in the microservices architecture with IoT-oriented containerized network services. We keep track of the performance metrics of microservices, such as service response time, memory usage and availability, to detect anomalies. By injecting faults in the services, we construct a Causal Bayesian Network (CBN) which represents the relation between service faults and metrics. Service Level Agreement (SLA) data obtained from a descriptor named TRAILS (sTakeholder Responsibility, AccountabIlity and Liability deScriptor) is also used to flag service providers which have failed their commitments. In the case of SLA violation, the constructed CBN is used to predict the fault probability of services under given metric readings and to identify the root cause.