Maximizing Error Injection Realism for Chaos Engineering With System Calls

In this article, we present a novel fault injection framework for system call invocation errors, called

Phoebe

.

Phoebe

is unique as follows; First,

Phoebe

enables developers to have full observability of system call invocations. Second,

Phoebe

generates error models that are realistic in the sense that they mimic errors that naturally happen in production. Third,

Phoebe

is able to automatically conduct experiments to systematically assess the reliability of applications with respect to system call invocation errors in production. We evaluate the effectiveness and runtime overhead of

Phoebe

on two real-world applications in a production environment for a single software stack: Java. The results show that

Phoebe

successfully generates realistic error models and is able to detect important reliability weaknesses with respect to system call invocation errors. To our knowledge, this novel concept of “realistic error injection”, which consists of grounding fault injection on production errors, has never been studied before.