Cloud API Oriented Analysis on Rolling Upgrade Dependability

When cloud operators conduct rolling upgrade operation on AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud applications, they interact with the cloud platform by indirectly calling rolling upgrade related cloud API functions provided in cloud platform, such as "UpdateAutoScalingGroup". Hence, rolling upgrade operation can be viewed as a series of rolling upgrade related cloud API calls. When calling those API functions in certain occasions, some errors might occur, e.g. the error of "ScalingActivityInProgress". These errors somehow account for the operation failures. This paper summarizes the possible errors for all the rolling upgrade related cloud API functions, and addresses when the errors would occur. We derive these research outcomes from an empirical study on these API functions. The empirical study is conducted by using AWS EC2 platform and AWS SDK for .NET. Our research provides a summarization for the error/failure scenarios of rolling upgrade related cloud APIs, and it can facilitate any other researches related to the dependability of cloud computing.