Cloud application deployment with transient failure recovery

Abstract

Application deployment is a crucial operation for modern cloud providers. The ability to dynamically allocate resources and deploy a new application instance based on a user-provided description in a fully automated manner is of great importance for the cloud users as it facilitates the generation of fully reproducible application environments with minimum effort. However, most modern deployment solutions do not consider the error-prone nature of the cloud: Network glitches, bad synchronization between different services and other software or infrastructure related failures with transient characteristics are frequently encountered. Even if these failures may be tolerable during an application's lifetime, during the deployment phase they can cause severe errors and lead it to failure. In order to tackle this challenge, in this work we propose AURA, an open source system that enables cloud application deployment with transient failure recovery capabilities. AURA formulates the application deployment as a Directed Acyclic Graph. Whenever a transient failure occurs, it traverses the graph, identifies the parts of it that failed and re-executes the respective scripts, based on the fact that when the transient failure disappears the script execution will succeed. Moreover, in order to guarantee that each script execution is idempotent, AURA adopts a lightweight filesystem snapshot mechanism that aims at canceling the side effects of the failed scripts. Our thorough evaluation indicated that AURA is capable of deploying diverse real-world applications to environments exhibiting high error probabilities, introducing a minimal time overhead, proportional to the failure probability of the deployment scripts.

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