Blogs (9) >>
SPLASH 2016
Sun 30 October - Fri 4 November 2016 Amsterdam, Netherlands

The rise of elastically scaling applications that frequently deploy new machines has led to the adoption of DevOps practices across the cloud engineering stack. So-called configuration management tools utilize scripts that are based on declarative resource descriptions and make the system converge to the desired state. It is crucial for convergent configurations to be able to gracefully handle transient faults, e.g., network outages when downloading and installing software packages. In this paper we introduce a conceptual framework for asserting reliable convergence in configuration management. Based on a formal definition of configuration scripts and their resources, we utilize state transition graphs to test whether a script makes the system converge to the desired state under different conditions. In our generalized model, configuration actions are partially ordered, often resulting in prohibitively many possible execution orders. To reduce this problem space, we define and analyze a property called preservation, and we show that if preservation holds for all pairs of resources, then convergence holds for the entire configuration. Our implementation builds on Puppet, but the approach is equally applicable to other frameworks like Chef, Ansible, etc. We perform a comprehensive evaluation based on real world Puppet scripts and show the effectiveness of the approach. Our tool is able to detect all idempotence and convergence related issues in a set of existing Puppet scripts with known issues as well as some hitherto undiscovered bugs in a large random sample of scripts.

Wed 2 Nov

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

15:40 - 17:20
Programming Frameworks, Tools, and MethodologiesOOPSLA at Matterhorn 2
Chair(s): Emerson Murphy-Hill Google
15:40
25m
Talk
Purposes, Concepts, Misfits, and a Redesign of GitAEC
OOPSLA
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
16:05
25m
Talk
Apex: Automatic Programming Assignment Error Explanation
OOPSLA
Dohyeong Kim Purdue University, Yonghwi Kwon Purdue University, Peng Liu Purdue University, I Luk Kim Purdue University, David Mitchel Perry Purdue University, Xiangyu Zhang Purdue University, Gustavo Rodriguez-Rivera Purdue University
DOI Media Attached
16:30
25m
Talk
Asserting Reliable Convergence for Configuration Management ScriptsDistinguished Paper Award
OOPSLA
Oliver Hanappi Vienna University of Technology, Waldemar Hummer Vienna University of Technology, Schahram Dustdar TU Wien
DOI
16:55
25m
Talk
Dependent Partitioning
OOPSLA
Sean Treichler Stanford University, Michael Bauer NVIDIA Research, Rahul Sharma Microsoft Research, Elliott Slaughter , Alex Aiken Stanford University
DOI Media Attached