Automating Failure Testing Research at Internet Scale

Abstract

Large-scale distributed systems must be built to anticipate and mitigate a variety of hardware and software failures. In order to build confidence that fault-tolerant systems are correctly implemented, Netflix (and similar enterprises) regularly run failure drills in which faults are deliberately injected in their production system. The combinatorial space of failure scenarios is too large to explore exhaustively. Existing failure testing approaches either randomly explore the space of potential failures randomly or exploit the "hunches" of domain experts to guide the search. Random strategies waste resources testing "uninteresting" faults, while programmer-guided approaches are only as good as human intuition and only scale with human effort.