Automating Experimentation on Distributed Testbeds

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Abstract:

Engineering distributed systems is a challenging activity.
This is partly due to the intrinsic complexity of distributed
systems, and partly due to the practical obstacles that de-
velopers face when evaluating and tuning their design and
implementation decisions. This paper addresses the latter
aspect, providing techniques for software engineers to auto-
mate the experimentation activity. Our approach is founded
on a suite of models that characterize the distributed sys-
tem under experimentation, the testbeds upon which the
experiments are to be carried out, and the client behaviors
that drive the experiments. The models are used by gen-
erative techniques to automate construction of the work-
loads, as well as construction of the scripts for deploying
and executing the experiments on distributed testbeds. The
framework is not targeted at a specific system or application
model, but rather is a generic, programmable tool. We have
validated our approach by performing experiments on a va-
riety of distributed systems. For two of these systems, the
experiments were deployed and executed on the PlanetLab
wide-area testbed. Our experience shows that this frame-
work can be readily applied to different kinds of distributed
system architectures, and that using it for meaningful exper-
imentation, especially in large-scale network environments,
is advantageous.