Abstract

It is notoriously difficult to make distributed systems reliable. This becomes even harder in the case of the widely-deployed systems that become heterogeneous and federated. The set of routers in charge of the inter-domain routing in the Internet is a prime example of such a system. The unanticipated interaction of nodes under seemingly valid configuration changes and local fault-handling can have a profound effect. For example, the Internet has suffered from multiple IP prefix hijackings, as well as performance and reliability problems due to emergent behavior resulting from a local session reset.

We argue that the key step in making these systems reliable is the need to automatically predict faults. In this talk, I will describe the design and implementation of DiCE, a system that uses temporal and spatial awareness to predict faults in heterogeneous, federated systems. Our live evaluation in the testbed shows that DiCE quickly and successfully predicts two important classes of faults, operator mistakes and programming errors, that have plagued BGP routing in the Internet.

Joint work with Vojin Jovanovic, Gautam Kumar, and Dejan Kostic

Marco’s home page: http://people.epfl.ch/marco.canini