Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Staged Deployment in Mirage, an Integrated Software Upgrade Testing and Distribution System

Authors: Olivier Crameri (EPFL), Nikola Knezevic (EPFL), Dejan Kostic (EPFL), Ricardo Bianchini (Rutgers), and Willy Zwaenepoel (EPFL)

Paper: http://www.sosp2007.org/papers/sosp076-crameri.pdf

This paper seems to focus on the issue of clustering machines that behave identically with respect to an upgrade.

Heuristically categorize dependencies used at runtime. Can be user-defined. Fingerprint resources. Categorize based on set of resources.

How effective is automatic resource classification? Good...no errors, though small single digit number of vendor-specific rules.

Q: Isn't this going to slow things down and make things easier for people to exploit security flaws?
A: As we said, there's a tradeoff

Q: Could this help you narrow down differences in configuration that cause bugs?
A: Hopefully.

Q: Isn't the number of configurations subject to combinatorial explosions?
A: Sure, possible...in practice hopefully not? We're studying this now.

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