Controlling cloud-based systems for elasticity test reproduction

Abstract

Systems deployed on elastic infrastructures deal with resource variations by adapting themselves, which is error-prone. Therefore, we must test Cloud-Based Systems (CBS) throughout elasticity. Such tests may be re-executed regularly to diagnose and fix CBS bugs, which requires to design tests to execute in a deterministic manner. In this paper, we identify three main challenges that testers face when reproducing elasticity tests: to control the elasticity behaviour, to select specific resources to be deallocated, and to coordinate events parallel to elasticity. Since elasticity tests can last long, we consider the test execution time as a secondary challenge. In this paper, we propose an approach that meets such challenges. Experimental results show that the proposed approach successfully reproduces elasticity-related bugs that face the listed challenges while reducing the execution time.