Biblio

Modern Internet applications are being disaggregated into a microservice-based architecture, with services being updated and deployed hundreds of times a day. The accelerated software life cycle and heterogeneity of language runtimes in a single application necessitates a new approach for testing the resiliency of these applications in production infrastructures. We present Gremlin, a framework for systematically testing the failure-handling capabilities of microservices.  Gremlin is based on the observation that microservices are loosely coupled and thus rely on standard message-exchange patterns over the network. Gremlin allows the operator to easily design tests and executes them by manipulating inter-service messages at the network layer. We show how to use Gremlin to express common failure scenarios and how developers of an enterprise application were able to discover previously unknown bugs in their failure-handling code without modifying the application.

Software-defined networking (SDN) can enable diverse network management applications such as traffic engineering, service chaining, network function outsourcing, and topology reconfiguration. Realizing the benefits of SDN for these applications, however, entails addressing complex network optimizations that are central to these problems. Unfortunately, such optimization problems require significant manual effort and expertise to express and non-trivial computation and/or carefully crafted heuristics to solve. Our vision is to simplify the deployment of SDN applications using general high-level abstractions for capturing optimization requirements from which we can efficiently generate optimal solutions. To this end, we present SOL, a framework that demonstrates that it is indeed possible to simultaneously achieve generality and efficiency. The insight underlying SOL is that SDN applications can be recast within a unifying path-based optimization abstraction, from which it efficiently generates near-optimal solutions, and device configurations to implement those solutions. We illustrate the generality of SOL by prototyping diverse and new applications. We show that SOL simplifies the development of SDN-based network optimization applications and provides comparable or better scalability than custom optimization solutions.