PreFail: Programmable and Efficient Failure Testing Framework

As hardware failures are no longer rare in the era of cloud computing, reliability has become a first-class design goal of today's cloud software systems. To ensure that software's fault-tolerance "Prevails" against hardware failures, cloud systems have to be tested against multiple, diverse failures that are likely to occur in the real-world. Such failure testing poses several challenges including the need to explore a large number of combinations of failures, and also by implication, to debug a large number of test runs that fail during testing. In this paper, the authors present PREFAIL, a programmable and efficient failure testing framework.