Process-Oriented Non-intrusive Recovery for Sporadic Operations on Cloud

Abstract

Cloud-based systems get changed more frequently than traditional systems. These frequent changes involve sporadic operations such as installation and upgrade. Sporadic operations may fail due to the uncertainty of cloud platforms. Each sporadic operation manipulates a number of cloud resources. The accessibility of resources manipulated makes it possible to build an accurate process model of the correct behavior for an operation and its desired effects. This paper proposes a non-intrusive recovery approach for sporadic operations on cloud, called POD-Recovery. POD-Recovery utilizes the above-mentioned process model of the operation. When needed, it triggers recovery actions based on the model through non-intrusive means, i.e., without modifying the code which implements the sporadic operation. POD-Recovery employs an efficient artificial intelligence (AI) planning technique for generating recovery plans. We implement POD-Recovery and evaluate it by recovering from faults injected into 920 runs of five representative sporadic operations.

How bad can a bug get? an empirical analysis of software failures in the OpenStack cloud computing platform

“…Another important approach to mitigate failures is to implement fault containment strategies. Examples are i) interrupting a service as soon as a failure occurs (i.e., a fail-stop behavior), by turning high-severity failures, such as data losses, into lower-severity API exceptions that can be gracefully be handled [5,57,71]; ii) notifying the cloud management system and operators about the failures through error logs, so that they can diagnose issues and undertake recovery actions, such as restoring a previous state checkpoint or backup [19,75]; iii) separating system components across different domains to prevent cascading failures across components [2,26,34].…”