Yuxuan Jiang

Home Institution
Zhejiang University - The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year Participated
2022

Year in School
Undergraduate

REU Faculty Mentor
Tianyin Xu

Research Area Interest
Systems and Networking

Project Title
Acto: Automatic, Continuous Testing for (Kubernetes/OpenShift) Operators

Biography & Research Abstract

Abstract:

Today’s data center systems are increasingly built with several subsystems incorporating with each other. To alleviate the management overhead and increase hardware utilization, companies use cluster management systems (Twine, Kubernetes, Nomad, etc). These cluster management systems provide building blocks to help DevOps engineers deploy and manage their applications. But in order to exploit application specific functionalities, developers need to write controllers for each of the applications. The controllers automatically manage the application in a declarative manner. There was a previous testing framework for Kubernetes operators, but that tool aims to use fault injection to test operators under faulty conditions. But correct management requires correct implementation of controllers. It is challenging to reason about controllers’ correctness since it heavily interacts with the environment. The controller receives the users’ declaration and continuously drives the application to the desired state. There are a lot of unit tests, but only a few system tests. And most of the system tests only test one input, while a lot of the operator logic involves driving the system from one state to another. We propose an automated end-to-end testing tool to improve the reliability of Kubernetes controllers(operators).

Bio:

Hello there! I am Yuxuan Jiang, a Computer Engineering junior at ZJU-UIUC Institute. I am a life enthusiast and I feel motivated to push a technology-driven social revolution through research and port the solutions to industry for broader effects. I was involved in the SE REU program last summer. I received advanced techniques and knowledge in the field of reliability issues of quorum systems from Prof. Tianyin Xu. Later, I won the first prize in a business contest thanks to this knowledge I have learned during SE REU 2021.