# Observability and Chaos Engineering on System Calls for Containerized Applications in Docker

## TL;DR

This paper introduces ChaosOrca, a novel fault injection system for system calls in containerized applications, enabling resilience evaluation under production-like workloads without application instrumentation.

## Contribution

ChaosOrca is the first system to perform non-intrusive, comprehensive system call fault injection in containerized environments for resilience testing.

## Key findings

- ChaosOrca effectively detects resilience weaknesses in real-world applications.
- System call perturbations reveal vulnerabilities in application fault tolerance.
- The approach operates under production-like workloads without modifying applications.

## Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel fault injection system called ChaosOrca for system calls in containerized applications. ChaosOrca aims at evaluating a given application's self-protection capability with respect to system call errors. The unique feature of ChaosOrca is that it conducts experiments under production-like workload without instrumenting the application. We exhaustively analyze all kinds of system calls and utilize different levels of monitoring techniques to reason about the behaviour under perturbation. We evaluate ChaosOrca on three real-world applications: a file transfer client, a reverse proxy server and a micro-service oriented web application. Our results show that it is promising to detect weaknesses of resilience mechanisms related to system calls issues.