Reckon - Benchmarking consensus systems for availability under failures.

As seen at HAOC21: Examining Raft's behaviour during partial network failures.

Allowing us to dissect failures:

Installation

First openvswitch must be loaded as a kernel module on the host. On ubuntu this is done by apt install openvswitch-switch, however other distributions will require an equivalent but different invocation.

Recommended method with Docker

Run make docker to build a docker container containing all dependencies required to run a test with any of the clients, and to subsequently start it up, putting you into a Bash shell.

Manual approach

• Install mininet
• Build the relevant system and client via cd systems/<relevant-system> && make system && make client

Running a test

A typical test has the following steps:

• Build docker image and enter the container with make ~10 mins
• Define the desired test and run with python -m reckon <other arguments>

Positional arguments are as follows: <system> <topology> <workload> <fault>

• Supported systems:
  • etcd: the strongly consistent key value store used in Kubernetes.
• Supported topologies:
  • simple: A star topology with end-to-end loss and latency configurable via --link-loss and --link-latency.
  • wan: A WAN style network with --number-nodes data-centers with a node and a client in each data-center.
• Supported workloads:
  • uniform: Keys are uniformly distributed in [0,--max-key], values are --payload-size bytes long strings.
• Supported faults:
  • none: no fault occurs
  • leader: The leader is killed at 1/3 of the duration (T), and recovers at 2/3T.
  • partial-partition: A partial partition is injected at 1/3T and removed at 2/3T. This blocks communication between the leader of the cluster and one follower
  • intermittent-partial/intermittent-full: An intermittent full and partial partiion between one node (who is initially the leader) and a follower. The leader is always able to communicate with a majority of nodes. Time between faults is set by --mtbf.
  • kill-n: kill --kill-n at the start of the test. This tests maximal fault situations when some of the cluster has died at the start of the test.
• Other arguments
  • -d: enter a debug mininet cli where the topology is constructed and system started.
  • --duration: duration of the test.
  • --result-location: where to write the results of the test.

This can be automated as in scripts/tester.py or scripts/lossy_etcd.py, and a safer running environment is scripts/run.sh <command>.