Automated Deployment and Evaluation of Fault Tolerant Systems Using a Metal-as-a-Service Cloud

Problem

The traditional operation system (OS) virtualization as well as the emerging container systems aim at increasing the utilization of a single physical machine, e.g. via multi-tenant Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds. Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) takes a different approach. Instead of virtual machines or containers, MaaS clouds offer complete physical machines to the customers. This is especially useful, when the deployed software has special features that can not or only with big effort, be virtualized, as it will be directly deployed on the hardware. Furthermore, since the customers have full control over the host machines, they can always utilize the entire computing resource in case of resource-intensive workloads, without concerning other customers’ applications. There are well established management and orchestration tools for MaaS clouds, such as Ubuntu MaaS and Ansible. In our previous work we have built an automated deployment and evaluation platform for Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocols using a MaaS cloud. However, some parts of the work such as the analysis of evaluation resutls and deployed application updating are still handled manually.

Solution

This work aims to provide a solution for conducting the analysis upon evaluation results of the deployed protocols, as well as for continuously updating the protocols deployed and evaluated in the cloud. Moreover, besides the already deployed BFT protocols, a crash fault tolerant protocol named Raft is also added to the cloud for evaluating its performance.