Testing for Bugs of Cloud-Based Applications Resulting from Spot Instance Revocations

Abstract

One of the major advantages of cloud spot instances in cloud computing is to allow stakeholders to economically deploy their applications at much lower costs than that of other types of cloud instances. In exchange, spot instances are often exposed to revocations (i.e., terminations) by cloud providers. With spot instances becoming pervasive, terminations have become a part of the normal behavior of cloud-based applications; thus, these applications may be left in an incorrect state leading to certain bugs. Unfortunately, these applications are not designed or tested to deal with this behavior in the cloud environment, and as a result, the advantages of cloud spot instances could be significantly minimized or even entirely negated. We propose a novel solution to automatically find these bugs and locate their causes in the source code. We evaluate our solution using 10 popular open-source applications. The results show that our solution not only finds more instances and different types of these bugs compared to the random approach, but it also locates the causes of these bugs to help developers to improve the design of the shutdown process for cloud-based applications.