ContAv: A Tool to Assess Availability of Container-Based Systems

The momentum gained by the microservice-oriented architecture is fostering the diffusion of operating system containers. Existing studies mainly focus on the performance of containerized services to demonstrate their low resource footprints. However, availability analysis of densely deployed container-based solutions is less visited due to difficulties in collecting failure artifacts. This is especially true when the containers are combined with virtual machines to achieve a higher security level. Inspired by Google's Kubernetes architecture, in this paper, we propose ContAv, an open-source distributed statistical model checker to assess availability of systems built on containers and virtual machines. The availability analysis is based on novel state-space and non-state-space models designed by us and that are automatically built and customized by the tool. By means of a graphical interface, ContAv allows domain experts to easily parameterize the system, to compare different configurations and to perform sensitivity analysis. Moreover, through a simple Java API, system architects can design and characterize the system behavior with a failure response and migration service.