Enhancing Fault Injection Testing of Service Systems via Fault-Tolerance Bottleneck

Modern large-scale service systems are usually deployed with redundant components to ensure high dependability in distributed and volatile environments. Fault Injection Testing (FIT) is a popular technique for testing such systems, while the application of FIT to validating the correctness of redundant components remains a challenging task, especially when the system's structural information is unavailable when testing starts. In this study, we refer to a minimum set of faults that, when injected, will cut off all execution paths in a service system as a fault-tolerance bottleneck, and we propose a novel Fault-tolerance Bottleneck driven Fault Injection (FBFI) approach to the exploration and validation of redundant components without prior knowledge of the system's business structure. The core idea of FBFI is to iteratively infer and inject bottlenecks of the business structure constructed so far. In this way, FBFI is able to discover and test redundant components by repeatedly triggering new system behaviors. The effectiveness and efficiency of FBFI is evaluated using two microservice benchmark systems with different deployment scales. The results reveal that FBFI is more practical and cost-effective than random and lineage-driven FIT approaches in testing service systems of high redundancy levels.

I. Introduction

The increasing prevalence of service-oriented computing is dramatically changing the way that people develop and use software. This new paradigm brings immense benefits for building large and complex service systems, but it also exposes these systems to runtime anomalies, as service components are usually developed in a heterogeneous way and deployed in a distributed cloud environment [1]. Dependability has thus become a crucial concern in the design and implementation of modern service systems [2], [3].