CAREER: DrCloud: Drill-Ready Cloud Computing

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Cloud computing is pervasive, but cloud service outages still take place. This proposal addresses how to ensure that failure recovery will work robustly in many deployment scenarios. To address this important question, this project proposes drill-ready cloud computing (DrCloud), a new dependability paradigm that advocates cloud systems to routinely perform "failure drills" in real deployments (i.e., deliberately schedule real failures rather than waiting for unexpected real failures to happen). This practice can unearth in-production recovery issues and prevent real outages. This project will create five building blocks of drill-ready cloud computing: methodology, safety, efficiency, usability, and generality. Specifically, these five sub-projects will substantiate a new research methodology via a formal study of hundreds of in-production recovery issues, devise mechanisms that guarantee safety (no data loss and performance disruptions) analogous to a proper fire drill preparation, develop techniques that maximize resource and monetary efficiency of drill execution, design a specification language and its runtime that simplifies drill usability, and finally boost drill generality beyond failure drills (e.g., supporting software upgrade and configuration change drills). The DrCloud project will enrich decades of research and literature in fault-tolerant computing. The project will also bring many direct benefits to the society; users from many areas increasingly use large-scale storage and computation services, depending on high availability and predictability that drill-ready cloud computing will facilitate. The project will also involve state-of-the-art scale-out cloud systems (Hadoop, Cassandra, HBase, etc.). Adding drill-readiness to these systems will provide prototypes of next-generation reliable systems.