CloudTB: A quick and reliable testbed for virtual machine based cloud computing systems

Testing plays an important role in software development cycle. Meanwhile, cloud computing has become one of the major trends in information technology. Built on top of virtualization technology, cloud computing systems can expand dynamically, contributed to the fact that the services deployed on clouds have remarkable differences with the traditional or distributed deployed ones. As a result, the state of art tools and methods used for dependability testing are not suitable for cloud computing systems. We design and implement a test bed, CloudTB, for testing the dependability of cloud computing systems. First, based on a highly efficient and extremely fast communication mechanism, CloudTB can guarantee a minimal time spent on dispatching the test commands. Second, CloudTB is able to target testing nodes in the dynamically expanding cloud computing systems with an accuracy of 100%, by taking advantages of SSH based authentication methods and HASH mapping mechanisms. Furthermore, CloudTB provides universal fault injection and stresses testing modules to test how the services and clouds perform when the environment and facilities are dynamically changing under massive requests. Finally, CloudTB is scalable enough to test thousands of nodes simultaneously and supports testing with test cases wrote by third parties. The evaluation results show that CloudTB is able to send more than 100 thousand and receive more than 40 thousand pieces of 1k-length message per second while testing million nodes simultaneously, with an accuracy of 100% for targeting. Thus we believe CloudTB is the perfect test bed with efficient, scalable, accurate, and viable support for testing the dependability of cloud computing systems.