Architecture for the Automation of Live Testing of Cloud Systems

Abstract

Live testing is performed in the production environment. In such environment, test activities have to be orchestrated properly to avoid interferences with normal usage traffic. Conducting live testing activities manually is error prone because of the size and the complexity of the system as well as the required complex orchestration of different tasks. Furthermore, it would be impossible to react to failures and contain them in due time without automation. Live testing requires a high level of automation. This automation comes with several challenges especially in contexts such as cloud and zero touch networks because of the diversity of the software composing them. In this paper we discuss the challenges of automating live testing for cloud systems. We propose an architecture that relies on a modeling framework to decouple the specification of testing activities from the platforms needed to conduct them. We propose a solution for conducting testing activities on a live system according to such a specification.