CSR: Small: Proactive Methods in Handling Configuration Errors in Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructures

根据多项研究，配置错误(即错误配置)是导致系统故障的主要原因。例如，错误的配置已在多个数据中心和商业云基础设施中导致严重崩溃和全中心停机，影响数百万客户。除了系统停机时间外，错误配置还会浪费工程师或管理员在故障排除和纠正方面的时间，导致巨大的维护和支持成本。尽管最近检测错误配置的工作在一定程度上改善了这种情况，但根本原因需要更好地解决。基于PIS最近对商业和开源系统中的546个真实世界配置错误进行的经验研究所获得的见解，该项目的智力价值在于采取更根本的方法，以积极、预期的方式从根本原因解决错误配置问题。这项工作有三个目标：(1)改进配置设计，使其不容易出错；(2)强化软件系统，以更好地容忍和优雅地应对用户的配置错误；以及(3)检测难以检查的配置问题，如兼容性和跨组件参数不一致。更广泛的影响包括显著减少数据中心的系统停机时间，降低供应商在排除配置问题方面的客户支持成本，以及计划的教育、外联和扩大参与活动。

Configuration errors (i.e., misconfiguration) are a major cause of system failures according to several studies. For example, misconfiguration has caused serious crashes and center-wide outages in a number of data centers and commercial cloud infrastructures affecting millions of customers. In addition to system down time, misconfiguration also wastes engineers' or administrators' time in troubleshooting and corrections, leading to significant maintenance and support costs.Although recent work on detecting misconfiguration has improved the situation to some degree, the fundamental root cause needs to be better addressed. Based on the insights gained from the PIs' recent empirical study on 546 real world configuration errors in commercial and open source systems, the intellectual merit of this project is to take a more fundamental approach to addressing misconfiguration problems from the root cause in a proactive, anticipatory way. This work has three objectives: (1) to improve configuration design to make them less error-prone; (2) to harden software systems to better tolerate and gracefully react to users' configuration errors; and (3) to detect hard-to-check configuration issues such as compatibility and cross-component parameter inconsistency.The broader impacts include significantly reducing the amount of system downtime in data centers, decreasing vendors' customer support cost for troubleshooting configuration issues, and planned educational, outreach, and broadening participation activities.