Automatic server role identification for cloud infrastructure construction

Abstract

The recent progress in computer performance and the development of virtualization technologies has led to the prevalence of cloud computing. Data center providers providing public cloud services have to install additional resources and infrastructures continuously to keep up with the increasing demands from cloud users. Since the newly installed infrastructure (e.g. servers) usually have similar structure as the existing infrastructure, the configuration settings for the existing ones can be copied and used for the new one. One of the exceptions is network setting (e.g. IP address) which must be customized for each infrastructure. However, the customization requires manual configuration, which can cause misconfigurations, resulting in communication failures in the new infrastructure. One of the promising approaches to identify the misconfigurations is to detect the differences between the communication logs recorded in the existing infrastructure and the new infrastructure being developed. In order to execute this approach, we need to identify a pair of servers that play the same role in the existing and new infrastructure so that we can verify whether or not the same functions are working properly in both of these infrastructures. In this paper, we propose a method that automatically identifies the pair of servers playing the same role by detecting the common communication patterns observed in both infrastructures. We evaluated our method in actual cloud infrastructure and confirmed that it identified 94.1% of corresponding pairs of servers correctly.