Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
1-2022
Abstract
Microservice systems are complicated due to their runtime environments and service communications. Debugging a failure involves the deployment and manipulation of microservice systems on a containerized environment and faces unique challenges due to the high complexity and dynamism of microservices. To address these challenges, we propose a debugging approach for microservice systems based on the delta debugging algorithm, which is to minimize failure-inducing deltas of circumstances (e.g., deployment, environmental configurations). Our approach includes novel techniques for defining, deploying/manipulating, and executing deltas during delta debugging. In particular, to construct a (failing) circumstance space for delta debugging to minimize, our approach defines a set of circumstance dimensions that can affect the execution of microservice systems. To automate the testing of deltas, our approach includes the design of an infrastructure layer for automating deployment and manipulation of microservice systems. To optimize the delta debugging process, our approach includes the design of parallel execution for delta testing tasks. Our evaluation shows that our approach is scalable and efficient with the provided infrastructure resources and the designed parallel execution for optimization. Our experimental study on a medium-size microservice benchmark system shows that our approach can effectively identify failure-inducing deltas that help diagnose the root causes.
Keywords
microservices, fault localization, delta debugging, parallel optimization
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
Volume
15
Issue
1
First Page
16
Last Page
29
ISSN
1939-1374
Identifier
10.1109/TSC.2019.2919823
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
ZHOU, Xiang; PENG, Xin; XIE, Tao; SUN, Jun; JI, Chao; LI, Wenha; and DING, Dan.
Delta debugging microservice systems with parallel optimization. (2022). IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. 15, (1), 16-29.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4844
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2019.2919823