Delta debugging microservice systems

• Main Authors: ZHOU, Xiang, PENG, Xin, XIE, Tao, SUN, Jun, LI, Wenhai, JI, Chao, DING, Dan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Microservice; Delta Debugging; Testing; Computer Engineering; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4656; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5659/viewcontent/ase18_debugmicroservice.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Debugging microservice systems involves the deployment and manipulation of microservice systems on a containerized environment and faces unique challenges due to the high complexity and dynamism of microservices. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a debugging approach for microservice systems based on the delta debugging algorithm, which is to minimize failureinducing deltas of circumstances (e.g., deployment, environmental configurations) for effective debugging. Our approach includes novel techniques for defining, deploying/manipulating, and executing deltas following the idea of delta debugging. In particular, to construct a (failing) circumstance space for delta debugging to minimize, our approach defines a set of dimensions that can affect the execution of microservice systems. Our experimental study on a medium-size microservice benchmark system shows that our approach can effectively identify failure-inducing deltas that help diagnose the root causes.