Mutiny! How does Kubernetes fail, and what can we do about it?
<|reference_start|>Mutiny! How does Kubernetes fail, and what can we do about it?: In this paper, we i) analyze and classify real-world failures of Kubernetes (the most popular container orchestration system), ii) develop a framework to perform a fault/error injection campaign targeting the data store preserving the cluster state, and iii) compare results of our fault/error injection experiments with real-world failures, showing that our fault/error injections can recreate many real-world failure patterns. The paper aims to address the lack of studies on systematic analyses of Kubernetes failures to date.   Our results show that even a single fault/error (e.g., a bit-flip) in the data stored can propagate, causing cluster-wide failures (3% of injections), service networking issues (4%), and service under/overprovisioning (24%). Errors in the fields tracking dependencies between object caused 51% of such cluster-wide failures. We argue that controlled fault/error injection-based testing should be employed to proactively assess Kubernetes' resiliency and guide the design of failure mitigation strategies.<|reference_end|>
@article{barletta2024mutiny!,
    title={Mutiny! How does Kubernetes fail, and what can we do about it?},
    author={Marco Barletta, Marcello Cinque, Catello Di Martino, Zbigniew T.
  Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar K. Iyer},
    journal={54th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable
  Systems and Networks (DSN), Brisbane, Australia, 2024, pp. 1-14},
    year={2024},
    doi={10.1109/DSN58291.2024.00016},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.11169},
    primaryClass={cs.DC}
}