Why do migrations fail and what can we do about it?

  • Authors:
  • Gong Zhang;Ling Liu

  • Affiliations:
  • College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta;College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta

  • Venue:
  • LISA'11 Proceedings of the 25th international conference on Large Installation System Administration
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper investigates the main causes that make the application migration to Cloud complicated and error-prone through two case studies. We first discuss the typical configuration errors in each migration case study based on our error categorization model, which classifies the configuration errors into seven categories. Then we describe the common installation errors across both case studies. By analyzing operator errors in our case studies for migrating applications to cloud, we present the design of CloudMig, a semi-automated migration validation system with two unique characteristics. First, we develop a continual query (CQ) based configuration policy checking system, which facilitate operators to weave important configuration constraints into CQ-based policies and periodically run these policies to monitor the configuration changes and detect and alert the possible configuration constraints violations. Second, CloudMig combines the CQ based policy checking with the template based installation automation to help operators reduce the installation errors and increase the correctness assurance of application migration. Our experiments show that CloudMig can effectively detect a majority of the configuration errors in the migration process.