Experimental Assessment of Cloud Software Dependability Using Fault Injection

Abstract

Part 5: Distributed ComputingInternational audienceIn modern cloud software systems, the complexity arising from feature interaction, geographical distribution, security and configurability requirements increases the likelihood of faults. Additional influencing factors are the impact of different execution environments as well as human operation or configuration errors. Assuming that any non-trivial cloud software system contains faults, robustness testing is needed to ensure that such faults are discovered as early as possible, and that the overall service is resilient and fault tolerant. To this end, fault injection is a means for disrupting the software in ways that uncover bugs and test the fault tolerance mechanisms. In this paper, we discuss how to experimentally assess software dependability in two steps. First, a model of the software is constructed from different runtime observations and configuration information. Second, this model is used to orchestrate fault injection experiments with the running software system in order to quantify dependability attributes such as service availability. We propose the architecture of a fault injection service within the OpenStack project

Quantitative evaluation of fault propagation in a commercial cloud system

“…Thus, this method can be complementary to our method. Some other approaches for assessing cloud system reliability and security have been also explored in Yuan et al, 48 Herscheid et al, 49 Zimba et al, 50 and Wang et al 51 However, as stated in Cheng et al, 52 ''resilience to errors in the underlying hardware is a key design objective for a large class of computing systems, from embedded systems all the way to the cloud.'' To the best of our knowledge, our work is one of the few that sets up dependability models and the simulator of cloud systems, in order to understand failure behaviors originated in different levels of the CPU or bit-flips in registers.…”

Handling Faults in Service Oriented Computing: A Comprehensive Study

“…Thus, many studies have used fault injection methods for multiple reasons, as to evaluate and test a system [ 36 , 38 ], to generate representative failure data [ 39 ], to check performance and reliability [ 36 , 37 ], to assess dependability [ 40 ] and for security management [ 41 , 42 ]. Furthermore, fault injection techniques were combined with other fault handling perspectives, as fault tolerance in [ 5 ] to increase the reliability and performance of the system under test.…”