The increasing prevalence of the microservice paradigm creates a new demand for low-overhead virtualization techniques. Complementing containerization, unikernels are emerging as alternative approaches. With both techniques undergoing rapid improvements, the current landscape of lightweight virtualization approaches presents a confusing scenery, complicating the task of choosing a suited technology for an intended purpose. This work provides a comprehensive performance comparison covering containers, unikernels, whole-system virtualization, native hardware, and combinations thereof. Representing common workloads in microservice-based applications, we assess application performance using HTTP servers and a key-value store. With the microservice deployment paradigm in mind, we evaluate further characteristics such as startup time, image size, network latency, and memory footprint.

Software fault injection (SFI) is an acknowledged method for assessing the dependability of software systems. After reviewing the state-of-the-art of SFI, we address the challenge of integrating it deeper into software development practice. We present a well-defined development methodology incorporating SFI-fault injection driven development (FIDD)-which begins by systematically constructing a dependability and failure cause model, from which relevant injection techniques, points, and campaigns are derived. We discuss possibilities and challenges for the end-to-end automation of such campaigns. The suggested approach can substantially improve the accessibility of dependability assessment in everyday software engineering practice.

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