Availability Zone Fault Injector for Cloud Testing
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Cloud providers do not offer a feature to simulate availability zone failures, forcing administrators to develop manual and complex solutions that require significant expertise to ensure proper simulation.
Innovation Solution
A system and method for injecting faults into cloud provider resources based on user input, allowing for simulation of zone failures, with options for fixed or random fault injection modes, and graceful or non-graceful failure scenarios.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If cloud providers do not provide fault injection capability, then administrators must develop manual custom solutions, but this increases device complexity and requires significant subject matter expert input
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary fault injection service that mediates between administrators and cloud provider resources. This service provides pre-built fault injection capabilities through APIs, eliminating the need for administrators to create complex manual solutions while maintaining the ability to simulate zone failures for high availability testing
Solution Approach 2:
The fault injection service enables self-service by providing automated fault injection capabilities that administrators can access through simple API calls. The service handles the complexity of fault simulation internally, allowing administrators to inject faults without requiring deep expertise in cloud infrastructure or complex manual scripting
2Reliability
If manual custom solutions are developed to simulate zone failures, then fault injection capability is achieved, but the ease of operation deteriorates due to requiring large amounts of subject matter expert input
Solution Approach 1:
The fault injection service implements self-service by encapsulating complex fault simulation logic within automated services. Administrators can invoke fault injection through simple API calls without needing to understand the underlying complexity, making the operation as simple as calling a standardized interface while maintaining accurate zone failure simulation
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts the complex subject matter expert knowledge from the manual solution process and encapsulates it within the fault injection service. The service contains pre-configured fault injection patterns and best practices, allowing administrators to achieve accurate fault simulation without personally possessing expert knowledge
Data Source
AI summary
The technology described herein is directed towards fault injection to cloud provider resources, through a system that facilitates selection of specific resources in availability zone(s)/region(s). Example resources include VMs (virtual machines), VM clusters, tagged resource grouping and/or managed services. Based on (e.g., user) input data, the system injects faults to specified resources through cloud provider interfaces. The input data can specify availability zone(s), fault injection start time and duration. The input data can also specify fixed mode (fail specified resources together) or chaos mode (randomly inject failures for each resource individually). Failure type can be specified, e.g., graceful (e.g., clean shutdown) or non-graceful (e.g., a non-clean, hard fault). Based on the input, the system injects fault(s) using the modes selected to the specified resource(s) in the selected availability zone(s) for the duration entered. The user is provided the fault-related status information the during the duration.