CSR: Small: Proactive Methods in Handling Configuration Errors in Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructures

CSR：小：处理数据中心和云基础设施中配置错误的主动方法

• 批准号: 1321006
• 负责人: Yuanyuan Zhou
• 金额: $ 32.93万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-10-01 至 2017-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1321006&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CSR; Small; Proactive; Methods; Handling

Configuration errors (i.e., misconfiguration) are a major cause of system failures according to several studies. For example, misconfiguration has caused serious crashes and center-wide outages in a number of data centers and commercial cloud infrastructures affecting millions of customers. In addition to system down time, misconfiguration also wastes engineers' or administrators' time in troubleshooting and corrections, leading to significant maintenance and support costs.Although recent work on detecting misconfiguration has improved the situation to some degree, the fundamental root cause needs to be better addressed. Based on the insights gained from the PIs' recent empirical study on 546 real world configuration errors in commercial and open source systems, the intellectual merit of this project is to take a more fundamental approach to addressing misconfiguration problems from the root cause in a proactive, anticipatory way. This work has three objectives: (1) to improve configuration design to make them less error-prone; (2) to harden software systems to better tolerate and gracefully react to users' configuration errors; and (3) to detect hard-to-check configuration issues such as compatibility and cross-component parameter inconsistency.The broader impacts include significantly reducing the amount of system downtime in data centers, decreasing vendors' customer support cost for troubleshooting configuration issues, and planned educational, outreach, and broadening participation activities.

根据几项研究，配置误差（即错误配置）是系统失败的主要原因。例如，在许多数据中心和影响数百万客户的商业云基础架构中，造成了严重的崩溃和中间的停电。除了系统停机时间外，错误的配置还浪费了工程师或管理人员的故障排除和纠正的时间，从而导致了大量的维护和支持成本。尽管最近在检测错误配置的近期工作在某种程度上改善了情况，但基本的根本原因需要得到更好的解决。基于PIS最近对546个现实世界配置错误在商业和开源系统中的实证研究所获得的见解，该项目的智力优点是采取更基本的方法来以主动，预期的方式从根本原因解决错误的配置问题。这项工作具有三个目标：（1）改进配置设计以使其易于错误的错误； （2）硬化软件系统以更好地容忍并优雅地对用户的配置错误做出反应； （3）检测难以检查的配置问题，例如兼容性和跨组件参数不一致。更广泛的影响包括大大减少数据中心中系统停机时间的量，从而减少供应商的客户支持成本，以减少配置问题的故障，并计划进行的教育，脱颖而出，展望和扩大参与活动。