A Network-Level Distributed Fault Injector for Experimental Validation of Dependable Distributed Systems

The use of Java for distributed systems and high-available applications demands the validation of their fault tolerance mechanisms to avoid unexpected behavior during execution. We present an extension of FIONA (fault injector oriented to network applications), a fault injection environment to experimentally validate the dependability of distributed Java applications. The main features of this extension are: its distributed architecture, which allows centralized configuration of multiple faults scenarios, and the support for a wider fault model associated with distributed systems, which includes network partitioning. For monitoring, FIONA supports the collection of log information and includes a helper application to integrate this information in a global log for post-mortem dependability analysis. FIONA is simple to operate, and we expect it to facilitate the conduction of validation experiments by application developers and testers