ucXception: A Framework for Evaluating Dependability of Software Systems

Fault injection is a well-established technique in the research community that consists of emulating faults in order to obtain dependability-related data. Despite its potential, fault injection has been less widely adopted outside of academia, due to the expertise required to effectively conduct fault injection campaigns and to the lack of tools that can be easily adapted to different systems. This paper presents ucXception, an easy-to-install, extendable, open-source framework for orchestrating the entire lifecycle of fault injection campaigns without requiring expert knowledge and using a graphical interface. ucXception supports injection of software and hardware faults using realistic fault models and can be applied to a variety of target systems, including virtualized systems and complex cloud computing deployments. This brings fault injection to modern environments of cloud computing. As a use case, a preliminary analysis on the usage of failure models as a valid alternative to fault models is performed.