Automatic verification technology of software patches for user virtual environments on IaaS cloud

Abstract

We propose here a technique for automatic verification of software patches for user virtual environments on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud to reduce the cost of verifying patches. IaaS services have been spreading rapidly, and many users can customize virtual machines on IaaS Cloud like their own private servers. However, users must install and verify software patches of the OS or middleware installed on virtual machines by themselves. This task increases the user’s operation costs. Our proposed method replicates user virtual environments, extracts verification test cases for user virtual environments from a test case database (DB), distributes patches to virtual machines in the replicated environments, and executes the test cases automatically on the replicated environments. To reduce test cases creation efforts, we propose an idea of two-tier abstraction which groups software to software groups and function groups and selects test cases belonging to each group. We applied the proposed method on OpenStack using Jenkins and confirmed its feasibility. We evaluated the effectiveness of test case creation efforts and the automatic verification performance of environment replications, test cases extractions, and test case executions.