Service-level fault injection testing

Abstract

Companies today increasingly rely on microservice architectures to deliver service for their large-scale mobile or web applications. However, not all developers working on these applications are distributed systems engineers and therefore do not anticipate partial failure: where one or more of the dependencies of their service might be unavailable once deployed into production. Therefore, it is paramount that these issues be raised early and often, ideally in a testing environment or before the code ships to production. In this paper, we present an approach called service-level fault injection testing and a prototype implementation called Filibuster, that can be used to systematically identify resilience issues early in the development of microservice applications. Filibuster combines static analysis and concolicstyle execution with a novel dynamic reduction algorithm to extend existing functional test suites to cover failure scenarios with minimal developer effort. To demonstrate the applicability of our tool, we present a corpus of 4 real-world industrial microservice applications containing bugs. These applications and bugs are taken from publicly available information of chaos engineering experiments run by large companies in production. We then demonstrate how all of these chaos experiments could have been run during development instead, and the bugs they discovered detected long before they ended up in production.