Fail through the Cracks: Cross-System Interaction Failures in Modern Cloud Systems
Lilia Tang, Chaitanya Bhandari, Yongle Zhang, Anna Karanika, Shuyang Ji, Indranil Gupta, Tianyin Xu
Abstract
Modern cloud systems are orchestrations of independent and interacting (sub-)systems, each specializing in important services (e.g., data processing, storage, resource management, etc.). Hence, cloud system reliability is affected not only by the reliability of each individual system, but also by the interplay between these systems. We observe that many recent production incidents of cloud systems are manifested through interactions across the system boundaries. However, there is a lack of systematic understanding of this emerging mode of failures, which we term as cross-system interaction failures (or CSI failures). This hinders the development of better design, integration practices, and new tooling.