Evaluation of RESTful frameworks under soft errors

RESTful frameworks provide a platform for easy deployment, and management of enterprise-level microservices in a scalable and maintainable manner. Like any computer system and its components, RESTful frameworks are susceptible to soft errors, a subset of transient hardware faults that are caused by cosmic rays and package impurities, which can lead to unexpected behaviour from the services that use the frameworks. Failures in these platforms can cause unavailability and unreliability which can lead to major damages including financial or reputation losses to the service providers, and frustration to users who rely on the service provided. Despite soft errors and their impact being a well-studied problem in some fields, such as aeronautics and safety-critical systems, their effect on service frameworks is still uncharacterized. This paper employs fault injection and fuzzing to evaluate how 5 different frameworks behave when affected by soft errors. The obtained results show that using a framework increases the probability of experiencing a failure by an amount that varies from framework to framework and suggest that most failures pose an issue for service availability, which can be relatively easily handled by standard fault tolerance techniques.

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