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arXiv · 2404.11169

Mutiny! How does Kubernetes fail, and what can we do about it?

Marco Barletta·Marcello Cinque·Catello Di Martino·Zbigniew T. Kalbarczyk·Ravishankar K. Iyer
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Abstract

In this paper, we i) analyze and classify real-world failures of Kubernetes (the most popular container orchestration system), ii) develop a framework to perform a fault/error injection campaign targeting the data store preserving the cluster state, and iii) compare results of our fault/error injection experiments with real-world failures, showing that our fault/error injections can recreate many real-world failure patterns. The paper aims to address the lack of studies on systematic analyses of Kubernetes failures to date. Our results show that even a single fault/error (e.g., a bit-flip) in the data stored can propagate, causing cluster-wide failures (3% of injections), service networking issues (4%), and service under/overprovisioning (24%). Errors in the fields tracking dependencies between object caused 51% of such cluster-wide failures. We argue that controlled fault/error injection-based testing should be employed to proactively assess Kubernetes' resiliency and guide the design of failure mitigation strategies.

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Marco Barletta, Marcello Cinque, Catello Di Martino, Zbigniew T. Kalbarczyk, Ravishankar K. Iyer. 2024-04-17. Mutiny! How does Kubernetes fail, and what can we do about it?. https://doi.org/10.1109/dsn58291.2024.00016

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