Practical fault detection in puppet programs

Thodoris Sotiropoulos, Dimitris Mitropoulos, Diomidis Spinellis

Abstract

Puppet is a popular computer system configuration management tool. By providing abstractions that model system resources it allows administrators to set up computer systems in a reliable, predictable, and documented fashion. Its use suffers from two potential pitfalls. First, if ordering constraints are not correctly specified whenever a Puppet resource depends on another, the non-deterministic application of resources can lead to race conditions and consequent failures. Second, if a service is not tied to its resources (through the notification construct), the system may operate in a stale state whenever a resource gets modified. Such faults can degrade a computing infrastructure's availability and functionality.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Sotiropoulos-al:ICSE20,
  author    = {Thodoris Sotiropoulos and
               Dimitris Mitropoulos and
               Diomidis Spinellis},
  title     = {Practical fault detection in puppet programs},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  pages     = {26--37},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2020},
}

Practical fault detection in puppet programs

Abstract

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