episode-17.xml

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<item xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd">
  <title>Debugging OpenStack Problems using a State Graph Approach</title>
  <guests>Yong Xiang from Tsinghua University</guests>
  <description>
    <p>
      Yong Xiang is a PhD student at Tsinghua University.  This episode is a
      recording of his talk during <a
      href="http://www.cs.hku.hk/apsys2016/program.html">APSys 2016</a>, the
      Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems, on Aug. 5, based on <a
      href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2967366">Debugging OpenStack
      Problems Using a State Graph Approach</a>, written with co-authors Hu Li,
      Sen Wang, Charley Peter Chen, and Wei Xu, which was awarded ``best
      paper'' at the conference.  A preprint of the paper is also available <a
      href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05963">at arxiv.org</a>.
    </p>

    <p>
      <a
      href="http://iiis.tsinghua.edu.cn/~weixu/files/apsys-yong-slides.pdf">Slides</a>
      from the talk are available.  It is probably easier to follow the talk if
      you have the slides available, but it is certainly not necessary.
    </p>

    <p>
      This is a very practical paper that seeks ways to make it easier for
      non-experts to troubleshoot and debug an OpenStack deployment.  Its
      abstract is:
    </p>

    <blockquote>
      It is hard to operate and debug systems like OpenStack that integrate
      many independently developed modules with multiple levels of
      abstractions. A major challenge is to navigate through the complex
      dependencies and relationships of the states in different modules or
      subsystems, to ensure the correctness and consistency of these states. We
      present a system that captures the runtime states and events from the
      entire OpenStack-Ceph stack, and automatically organizes these data into
      a graph that we call system operation state graph (SOSG). With SOSG we
      can use intuitive graph traversal techniques to solve problems like
      reasoning about the state of a virtual machine. Also, using a graph-based
      anomaly detection, we can automatically discover hidden problems in
      OpenStack. We have a scalable implementation of SOSG, and evaluate the
      approach on a 125-node production OpenStack cluster, finding a number of
      interesting problems.
    </blockquote>

    <p>
      The first question at the end of the talk comes from me, with an answer
      assisted by the paper's coauthor Wei Xu, and the second one from <a
      href="http://www.cse.iitd.ernet.in/~sbansal/">Sorav Bansal</a>.
    </p>

    <p class="attribution">
      OVS Orbit is produced by <a href="mailto:blp@ovn.org">Ben Pfaff</a>.  The
      intro music in this episode is <a
      href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/AlexBeroza/43098">Drive</a>,
      featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex.  The bumper music is
      <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/42100">Yeah Ant</a>
      featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck.  The outro
      music is <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/43005">Space
      Bazooka</a> featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid.  All content is licensed under a Creative Commons <a
      href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Attribution 3.0
      Unported (CC BY 3.0)</a> license.
    </p>
  </description>
<pubDate>Thu, 13 Oct 2016 14:22:16 GMT</pubDate>
</item>