Achieving Reliable High-Frequency Releases in Cloud Environments

Author

Liming Zhu ; Xu, Donna ; An Binh Tran ; Xiwei Xu ; Bass, Len ; Weber, Ingo ; Dwarakanathan, Srini

Volume

32

Issue

2

fYear

2015

fDate

Mar.-Apr. 2015

Firstpage

73

Lastpage

80

Abstract

Continuous delivery and deployment are dramatically shortening release cycles from months to hours. Cloud applications with high-frequency releases often rely heavily on automated tools and cloud infrastructure APIs to deploy new software versions. The authors report on reliability issues and how these tools and APIs contribute to them. They also analyze the trade-offs between using heavily baked and lightly baked virtual-image approaches, on the basis of experiments with Amazon Web Service OpsWorks APIs and the Chef configuration management tool. Finally, they propose error-handling practices for continuous-delivery facilities.

Keywords

application program interfaces; cloud computing; software reliability; Amazon Web Service OpsWorks API; achieving reliable high frequency releases; automated tools; chef configuration management tool; cloud applications; cloud environments; cloud infrastructure API; software versions; virtual image approaches; Cloud computing; Continuous production; Software development; Software engineering; Software reliability; Virtual machining; DevOps; continuous delivery; continuous deployment; release engineering; software engineering; system administration;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0740-7459

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MS.2015.23

Filename

7006340