Automatic verification technology of software patches for user virtual environments on IaaS cloud

Yoji Yamato

doi:10.1186/s13677-015-0028-6

Abstract

We propose here a technique for automatic verification of software patches for user virtual environments on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud to reduce the cost of verifying patches. IaaS services have been spreading rapidly, and many users can customize virtual machines on IaaS Cloud like their own private servers. However, users must install and verify software patches of the OS or middleware installed on virtual machines by themselves. This task increases the user’s operation costs. Our proposed method replicates user virtual environments, extracts verification test cases for user virtual environments from a test case database (DB), distributes patches to virtual machines in the replicated environments, and executes the test cases automatically on the replicated environments. To reduce test cases creation efforts, we propose an idea of two-tier abstraction which groups software to software groups and function groups and selects test cases belonging to each group. We applied the proposed method on OpenStack using Jenkins and confirmed its feasibility. We evaluated the effectiveness of test case creation efforts and the automatic verification performance of environment replications, test cases extractions, and test case executions.

Highlights

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing has advanced recently, and users can use virtual resources such as virtual machines, virtual networks, virtual routers, virtual storage, and virtual load balancers on demand from IaaS service providers
In Section Proposal of automatic verification technology of virtual machines patches, we propose automatic software patch verification technology for user virtual machines and describe a design to solve the problems of existing methods
25 test cases were prepared by service providers, but our proposed idea of software group and function group abstraction was able to effectively select test cases based on user environments

Summary

Introduction

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing has advanced recently, and users can use virtual resources such as virtual machines, virtual networks, virtual routers, virtual storage, and virtual load balancers on demand from IaaS service providers (for example, Rackspace public cloud [1]). A patch is distributed only to virtual machines, verification test cases are executed for all virtual resources in a replicated user tenant. By abstracting software to software groups and function groups in our proposed idea, service providers can verify virtual machine patches by preparing only a small number of test cases.

Results

Conclusion