Observability and chaos engineering on system calls for containerized applications in Docker

In this paper, we present a novel fault injection system called ChaosOrca for system calls in containerized applications. ChaosOrca aims at evaluating a given application’s self-protection capability with respect to system call errors. The unique feature of ChaosOrca is that it conducts experiments under production-like workload without instrumenting the application. We exhaustively analyze all kinds of system calls and utilize different levels of monitoring techniques to reason about the behavior under perturbation. We evaluate ChaosOrca on three real-world applications: a file transfer client, a reverse proxy server and a micro-service oriented web application. Our results show that it is promising to detect weaknesses of resilience mechanisms related to system calls issues. •An architecture that achieves observability and perturbation for Docker containers.•A prototype implementation based on the state-of-art libraries used in industry.•An evaluation of the approach on three representative Docker applications.