Paper review: "Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems"

This paper appeared in OSDI'14 and is written by Ding Yuan, Yu Luo, Xin Zhuang, Guilherme Renna Rodrigues, Xu Zhao, Yongle Zhang, Pranay U. Jain, and Michael Stumm, University of Toronto.

While the title mentions "analysis of production failures", the paper is not concerned/interested in root cause analysis of failures, instead, the paper is preoccupied with problems in error handling that lead to failures.

I enjoyed this paper a lot. The paper has interesting counterintuitive results. It opens to discussion the error handling issue, and particularly the Java exception handling. Digesting and interpreting the findings in the paper will require time. To contribute to this process, here is my take on the findings ---after a quick summary of the paper.

The setup and terminology 

The paper studied 198 randomly sampled user-reported failures of 5 opensource data-intensive distributed systems: Cassandra, HBase, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Hadoop MapReduce, and Redis. Table 1 shows how the sampling is done. (As a superficial observation, it seems like HBase is very buggy where 50% of sampled failures are catastrophic, and Cassandra is well engineered.) Almost all of these systems are written in Java, so Java's exception-style error handling plays a significant role in the findings of the paper.

Definitions: A fault is the initial root cause, which could be a hardware malfunction, a software bug, or a misconfiguration. A fault can produce abnormal behaviors referred to as errors, such as Java exceptions. Some of the errors will have no user-visible side-effects or may be appropriately handled by software; other errors manifest into a failure, where the system malfunction is noticed by end users or operators.

The paper defines catastrophic failure as "failures where most or all users experience an outage or data loss". Unfortunately this is a very vague definition. Table 2 provides some example categories for catastrophic failures considered.

Findings 


Table 3 shows that single event input failures are relatively low, this is probably because these systems are well-tested with unit tests as they are heavily used in production. On the other hand, the predominating case is where 2 events conspire to trigger the failures.

From Table 4, what jumps up is that starting up services is particularly problematic. Incidentally, in airplanes most fatal accidents occur during the climbing stage.


Table 5 shows that almost all (98%) of the failures are guaranteed to manifest on no more than 3 nodes, and 84% will manifest on no more than 2 nodes. For large-scale distributed systems, 3 nodes being sufficient to manifest almost all failures seems surprisingly low. Of course, this paper looks at data-intensive distributed systems, which may not be representative of general distributed systems. In any case, these numbers don't surprise me as they agree with my experience using TLA+ in verifying distributed algorithms.


Deterministic failures totaling at 74% of all failures is good news. Deterministic failures are low-hanging fruit, they are easier to fix.

Catastrophic failures


Figure 5 shows a break-down of all catastrophic failures by their error handling. Based on this figure, the paper claims that "almost all (92%) of the catastrophic system failures are the result of incorrect handling of non-fatal errors explicitly signaled in software".

But, it seems to me that this provocative statement is due to a broad/vague definition of "incorrect error handling". If you use a broad/vague definition of "incorrect landing", you can say that every catastrophic airplane failure is an incorrect landing problem. Java casts everything into an error exception, then every fault materializes/surfaces as an exception. But, does that mean if we do a good job on exception handling, there will be almost no catastrophic failures? That is an incorrect assumption. Sometimes the correction required needs to be invasive (such as resetting nodes) and the correction also counts as a catastrophic failure.

And how can we do a good job on error handling? The paper does not provide help on that. Correct error-handling is very hard: You need a lot of context and a holistic understanding of the system, and that is probably why error-handling has been done sloppily in the systems studied.

The paper also claims: "in 58% of the catastrophic failures, the underlying faults could easily have been detected through simple testing of error handling code." I can agree with the 35%, as they consist of trivial mistakes in exception handling, such as an empty error handling block. But for including the other 23% labeling them as easily detectable, I think we should exercise caution and not rule out the hindsight bias.

To prevent this 23% failures, the paper suggests 100% statement coverage testing on the error handling logic. To this end, the paper suggests that reverse engineering test cases that trigger them. At the end of the day, this boils to thinking hard to see how this can be triggered. But how do we know when to quit and when we got enough? Without a rule, this can get cumbersome.

Figure10 shows an example of the 23% easily detectable failures. That example still looks tricky to me, even after we exercise the hindsight advantage.

Speculation about the causes for poor error-handling

Maybe one reason for poor error-handling in the studied systems is that features are sexy, but fault-tolerance is not. You see features, but you don't see fault-tolerance. Particularly, if you do fault-tolerance right, nobody notices it.

But, that is a simplistic answer. After all, these systems are commonly used in production, and they are well-tested with the FindBugs tool, unit tests, and fault injection. Then, why do they still suck so badly at their exception-handling code? I speculate that maybe there is a scarcity of "expert generalists", developers that understand the project as a whole and that can write error-handling/fault-tolerance code.

Another reason of course could be that developers may think a particular exception will never arise. (Some comments in the exception handlers in the 5 systems studied hint at that.) That the developers cannot anticipate how a particular exception can be raised doesn't mean it won't be raised. But, maybe we should include this case within the above case that says there is a scarcity of fault-tolerance experts/generalists in these projects.

"Correct" error handling

While the paper pushes for 100% error handling coverage,  it doesn't offer techniques for "correct" error handling. Correct error handling requires root cause analysis, a holistic view of the system, and fault-tolerance expertise.

So there is no silver bullet. Exceptions in Java, and error handling may facilitate some things, but there is no shortcut to fault-tolerance. Fault-tolerance will always have a price.

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.
It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.
C.A.R. Hoare

Possible future directions

Since 2-input triggered corruptions are predominant, maybe we should consider pairwise testing in addition to unit testing to guard against them. Unit testing is good for enforcing a component's local invariants. Pairwise testing can enforce an interaction invariant between two components, and guard against 2-input triggered corruptions.

I think the main reason it is hard to write "correct error handling" code is that the exception handler doesn't have enough information to know the proper way to correct the state. This is still futuristic, but if we had an eidetic system, then when exceptions hit, we could call the corrector, which can do a root-cause analysis by doing a backwards query on the eidetic system, and after determining the problem could do a forward query to figure out what are precisely the things that need to be fixed/corrected as a result of that fault.

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