Declarative testing and depolyment of distributed systems

Declarative testing and depolyment of distributed systems

Van der Burg, S.
Dolstra, E.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Technology

2010-12-31

System administrators and developers who deploy distributed systems have to deal with a deployment process that is largely manual and hard to reproduce. This paper describes how networks of computer systems can be reproducibly and automatically deployed from declarative specifications. Reproducibility also ensures that users can easily instantiate a test environment, before deploying the specification to the production environment. Furthermore, from the same specifications we can instantiate virtual networks of virtual machines for both interactive and automated testing. This makes it easy to write automated regression tests that require external machines, need special privileges, or depend on the network topology. We instantiate machines from the specifications using NixOS, a Linux distribution built from a purely functional specification. We have applied our approach to a number of representative problems, including automatic regression testing of a Linux distribution and deployment of a continuous integration environment Preprint accepted for publication in

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:c5e6c454-2dba-4e3d-b04c-dd1e2659e970

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

1872-5392

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2006-020

Institutional Repository

report

© 2010 The Author(s) . Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology