Fault Injection Analytics: A Novel Approach to Discover Failure Modes in Cloud-Computing Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a new fault injection analytics approach using unsupervised machine learning to efficiently identify failure modes in cloud computing systems, demonstrated on OpenStack.

Contribution

It introduces a novel paradigm applying unsupervised learning to fault injection data for failure mode discovery in cloud systems.

Findings

Accurately identifies failure modes in cloud systems

Low computational cost for analysis

Effective on OpenStack platform

Abstract

Cloud computing systems fail in complex and unexpected ways due to unexpected combinations of events and interactions between hardware and software components. Fault injection is an effective means to bring out these failures in a controlled environment. However, fault injection experiments produce massive amounts of data, and manually analyzing these data is inefficient and error-prone, as the analyst can miss severe failure modes that are yet unknown. This paper introduces a new paradigm (fault injection analytics) that applies unsupervised machine learning on execution traces of the injected system, to ease the discovery and interpretation of failure modes. We evaluated the proposed approach in the context of fault injection experiments on the OpenStack cloud computing platform, where we show that the approach can accurately identify failure modes with a low computational cost.