FReAK: fault injection based resilience assessment of Kubernetes

Some factors contributing to cluster outages and failures, resulting in revenue loss and diminished trust among cloud providers and users, are rooted within container orchestrators. This underscores the necessity for thorough resilience testing. Resilience assessment of Kubernetes, the most widely adopted container orchestrator, using nearly 12000 fault injections in the control plane of Kubernetes performed using FReAK, an automated fault injector, is presented in this thesis. Subsequently, the vulnerable functionalities of the components are uncovered. Additionally, a Bayesian model for fault localization and higher fault manifestation is designed. The results of the fault injections show that about 60% of the activated faults do not affect the control plane, but critical failures that make at least one control plane component unavailable were observed in 11% of the fault injections. Moreover, the API server turned out to be the most critical. The results also indicated insufficiency in input validation and insufficiency of heartbeats in indicating the availability of the components. Testing the Kubernetes control plane through such tests can aid in the development of more robust resilience strategies.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Sreejith, Harshitha

Contributors dc:contributor

• Iyer, Ravishankar K.

• Fault Injection
• Resilience
• Kubernetes
• Control Plane
• Failure
• Container Orchestration

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Harshitha Sreejith

Language dc:language

eng, en

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124728

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/124728