RINGS: Language-Agnostic Resilience Engineering at the Edge with WebAssembly

RINGS：使用 WebAssembly 进行与语言无关的边缘弹性工程

• 批准号: 2148301
• 负责人: Heather Miller
• 金额: $ 93万
• 依托单位: Carnegie-Mellon University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-05-01 至 2026-04-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2148301&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RINGS; Language; Agnostic; Resilience; Engineering

As public clouds and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) race to enable compute capabilities at the edge of their networks, software developers are no longer deploying just static files (video, images) at the edge, but significant application code as well. This presents a dramatic departure from current development practices. With this new breed of applications on the horizon, the security, performance, and feature requirements of the underlying execution platform grow commensurately. Second, the harsh reality of unexpected network failures at the edge forces every mainstream developer to become a distributed systems engineer. Distributed systems engineering multiplies complexity and difficulty manyfold, as partial failure (unavailability of one or more services) can adversely impact the system in unknown or hard-to-predict ways, even leading to catastrophic cascading failures. This research proposes an approach to full-stack “resilience engineering” to enable secure, effective, and performant edge computation in NextG systems. Our work focuses on and builds on WebAssembly, which is emerging as the common underlying language-agnostic execution platform in new edge computing environments. We propose a robust, performant, and secure experimental runtime engine with support for instrumentation and rapid prototyping that will facilitate fault injection and program repair. On top of this foundation, this work proposes a set of tools for programming language-agnostic fault injection, testing, and repair of resilience (distributed system-related) errors in distributed and networked systems. This would allow software developers to quickly and effectively test and fix resilience defects before application code is deployed to users, rather than simply deploying and hoping for the best without any indication of how that application behaves in the face of partial failure (which is the current state of the art). If widely adopted, the results of this work would, in turn, reduce the occurrence of catastrophic cascading failures that cause widespread outages in critical networked services.Essentially all software that we use as a society is now networked, meaning apps connect to multiple servers and coordinate together to complete a task (such as online banking, searching for nearby restaurants, and even streaming media). This project directly supports the development of dependable networked services. Prior to this research, apps are typically released to users without testing for issues at the network level between services. This work develops new ways to test this brave new world of networked software, making it possible for software developers to automatically discover and automatically repair bugs before that software is released to users. As a result of this research, we will have new tools that, if broadly used, can result in fewer outages of critical networked services that society depends on.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

随着公共云和内容交付网络（CDN）竞相在其网络边缘实现计算功能，软件开发人员不再只是在边缘部署静态文件（视频、图像），还部署重要的应用程序代码。这与目前的发展做法大相径庭。随着这一新的应用程序的出现，底层执行平台的安全性、性能和功能需求也随之增长。其次，边缘网络意外故障的严酷现实迫使每个主流开发人员成为分布式系统工程师。分布式系统工程的复杂性和难度成倍增加，因为部分故障（一个或多个服务的不可用）可能以未知或难以预测的方式对系统产生不利影响，甚至导致灾难性的级联故障。这项研究提出了一种全栈“弹性工程”的方法，以在NextG系统中实现安全，有效和高性能的边缘计算。我们的工作重点是WebAssembly，它正在成为新的边缘计算环境中常见的底层语言不可知的执行平台。我们提出了一个强大的，高性能的，安全的实验运行时引擎，支持仪器和快速原型，这将有助于故障注入和程序修复。在此基础上，这项工作提出了一套工具，用于编程语言无关的故障注入，测试和修复分布式和网络系统中的弹性（分布式系统相关）错误。这将允许软件开发人员在应用程序代码部署给用户之前快速有效地测试和修复弹性缺陷，而不是简单地部署和希望最好的，而没有任何关于应用程序在面对部分故障时如何表现的指示（这是当前的最新技术）。如果被广泛采用，这项工作的结果将反过来减少灾难性级联故障的发生，这些故障会导致关键网络服务的大范围中断。基本上，我们现在使用的所有软件都是网络化的，这意味着应用程序连接到多个服务器并协同完成一项任务（例如网上银行，搜索附近的餐馆，甚至流媒体）。该项目直接支持可靠的网络服务的开发。在这项研究之前，应用程序通常在没有测试服务之间的网络级别问题的情况下发布给用户。这项工作开发了新的方法来测试这个勇敢的网络软件新世界，使软件开发人员能够在软件发布给用户之前自动发现和自动修复错误。作为这项研究的结果，我们将有新的工具，如果广泛使用，可以减少社会所依赖的关键网络服务的中断。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

项目成果

A fast in-place interpreter for WebAssembly

WebAssembly 的快速就地解释器

• DOI: 10.1145/3563311
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
• 作者: Titzer, Ben L.