OSDI '04 Abstract
Pp. 6176 of the Proceedings
Understanding and Dealing with Operator Mistakes in Internet Services
Kiran Nagaraja, Fábio Oliveira, Ricardo Bianchini, Richard P. Martin, and Thu D. Nguyen, Rutgers University
Abstract
Operator mistakes are a significant source of unavailability in modern
Internet services. In this paper, we first characterize these
mistakes by performing an extensive set of experiments using human
operators and a realistic three-tier auction service. The mistakes we
observed range from software misconfiguration, to fault misdiagnosis,
to incorrect software restarts. We next propose to validate operator
actions before they are made visible to the rest of the system. We
demonstrate how to accomplish this task via the creation of a
validation environment that is an extension of the online system,
where components can be validated using real workloads before they are
migrated into the running service. We show that our prototype
validation system can detect 66% of the operator mistakes that we
have observed.
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