Early Detection of Configuration Errors to Reduce Failure Damage

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi16/osdi16-xu.pdf

Early detection is the key to minimizing failure damage induced by configuration errors, especially those errors in configurations that control failure handling and fault tolerance. Since such configurations are not needed for initialization, many systems do not check their settings early (e.g., at startup time). Consequently, the errors become latent until their manifestations cause severe damage, such as breaking the failure handling. Such latent errors are likely to escape from sysadmins’ observation and testing, and be deployed to production at scale.