Title
Testing Cloud Applications under Cloud-Uncertainty Performance Effects
Abstract
The paradigm shift of deploying applications to the cloud has introduced both opportunities and challenges. Although clouds use elasticity to scale resource usage at runtime to help meet an application's performance requirements, developers are still challenged by unpredictable performance, little control of execution environment, and differences among cloud service providers, all while being charged for their cloud usages. Application performance stability is particularly affected by multi-tenancy in which the hardware is shared among varying applications and virtual machines. Developers porting their applications need to meet performance requirements, but testing on the cloud under the effects of performance uncertainty is difficult and expensive, due to high cloud usage costs. This paper presents a first approach to testing an application with typical inputs for how its performance will be affected by performance uncertainty, without incurring undue costs of brute force testing in the cloud. We specify cloud uncertainty testing criteria, design a test-based strategy to characterize the black box cloud's performance distributions using these testing criteria, and support execution of tests to characterize the resource usage and cloud baseline performance of the application to be deployed. Importantly, we developed a smart test oracle that estimates the application's performance with certain confidence levels using the above characterization test results and determines whether it will meet its performance requirements. We evaluated our testing approach on both the Chameleon cloud and Amazon web services; results indicate that this testing strategy shows promise as a cost-effective approach to test for performance effects of cloud uncertainty when porting an application to the cloud.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ICST.2018.00018
2018 IEEE 11th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Cloud Applications,Software Testing on Cloud,Cloud Performance Uncertainty,Bootstrapping
Virtual machine,Paradigm shift,Computer science,Oracle,Brute force,Porting,Black box,Test strategy,Reliability engineering,Cloud computing
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2381-2834
978-1-5386-5013-4
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
48
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wei Wang11474152.25
Ningjing Tian200.34
Sunzhou Huang300.34
Sen He422.07
Abhijeet Srivastava500.34
mary lou soffa63668312.51
Lori L. Pollock7135199.78