Fitness-guided Resilience Testing of Microservice-based Applications

Modern distributed applications are moving toward a microservice architecture, in which each service is developed and managed independently, and new features and updates are delivered continuously. A guiding principle of microservice architecture is that it is vital to anticipate and mitigate a variety of hardware and software failures. In order to test the fault handling capabilities of microservices automatically, this paper presents IntelliFT, a guided resilience testing technique for microservice based applications, which aims to expose the defects in the fault-handling logic effectively within a fixed time limit. The characteristic of IntelliFT is that it leverages existing integration tests of the applications under test to explore the fault space, and decides whether injected faults can lead to severe failures by designing fitness-guided search technique. Our experimental results on a medium-size microservice benchmark system show that the proposed technique is effective, improves the state-of-the-art, and can quickly expose bugs in the recovery logic.