arXiv subjects

Andriy Miranskyy

Publications and source records attributed to Andriy Miranskyy.

49 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Anomaly Detection in Cloud Components

Cloud platforms, under the hood, consist of a complex inter-connected stack of hardware and software components. Each of these components can fail which may lead to an outage. Our goal is to improve the quality of Cloud services through early detection of such failures by analyzing resource utilization metrics. We tested Gated-Recurrent-Unit-based autoencoder with a likelihood function to detect anomalies in various multi-dimensional time series and achieved high performance.

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arXiv2020

Quantum Advantage and Y2K Bug: Comparison

Quantum Computers (QCs), once they mature, will be able to solve some problems faster than Classic Computers. This phenomenon is called "quantum advantage" (or a stronger term "quantum supremacy"). Quantum advantage will help us to speed up computations in many areas, from artificial intelligence to medicine. However, QC power can also be leveraged to break modern cryptographic algorithms, which pervade modern software: use cases range from encryption of Internet traffic, to encryption of disks, to signing blockchain ledgers. While the exact date when QCs will evolve to reach quantum advantage is unknown, the consensus is that this future is near. Thus, in order to maintain crypto agility of the software, one needs to start preparing for the era of quantum advantage proactively. In this paper, we recap the effect of quantum advantage on the existing and new software systems, as well as the data that we currently store. We also highlight similarities and differences between the security challenges brought by QCs and the challenges that software engineers faced twenty years ago while fixing widespread Y2K bug. Technically, the Y2K bug and the quantum advantage problems are different: the former was caused by timing-related problems, while the latter is caused by a cryptographic algorithm being non-quantum-resistant. However, conceptually, the problems are similar: we know what the root cause is, the fix (strategically) is straightforward, yet the implementation of the fix is challenging. To address the quantum advantage challenge, we create a seven-step roadmap, deemed 7E. It is inspired by the lessons-learnt from the Y2K era amalgamated with modern knowledge. The roadmap gives developers a structured way to start preparing for the quantum advantage era, helping them to start planning for the creation of new as well as the evolution of the existent software.

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arXiv2020

Is Your Quantum Program Bug-Free?

Quantum computers are becoming more mainstream. As more programmers are starting to look at writing quantum programs, they face an inevitable task of debugging their code. How should the programs for quantum computers be debugged? In this paper, we discuss existing debugging tactics, used in developing programs for classic computers, and show which ones can be readily adopted. We also highlight quantum-computer-specific debugging issues and list novel techniques that are needed to address these issues. The practitioners can readily apply some of these tactics to their process of writing quantum programs, while researchers can learn about opportunities for future work.

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arXiv2019

Immutable Log Storage as a Service

Logs contain critical information about the quality of the rendered services on the Cloud and can be used as digital evidence. Hence, we argue that the critical nature of logs calls for immutability and verification mechanism without the presence of a single trusted party. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based log system, called Logchain, which can be integrated with existing private and public blockchains. To validate the mechanism, we create Logchain as a Service (LCaaS) by integrating it with Ethereum public blockchain network. We show that the solution is scalable (being able to process 100 log files per second) and fast (being able to "seal" a log file in 23 seconds, on average).

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arXiv2019

On Usefulness of the Deep-Learning-Based Bug Localization Models to Practitioners

Background: Developers spend a significant amount of time and efforts to localize bugs. In the literature, many researchers proposed state-of-the-art bug localization models to help developers localize bugs easily. The practitioners, on the other hand, expect a bug localization tool to meet certain criteria, such as trustworthiness, scalability, and efficiency. The current models are not capable of meeting these criteria, making it harder to adopt these models in practice. Recently, deep-learning-based bug localization models have been proposed in the literature, which show a better performance than the state-of-the-art models. Aim: In this research, we would like to investigate whether deep learning models meet the expectations of practitioners or not. Method: We constructed a Convolution Neural Network and a Simple Logistic model to examine their effectiveness in localizing bugs. We train these models on five open source projects written in Java and compare their performance with the performance of other state-of-the-art models trained on these datasets. Results: Our experiments show that although the deep learning models perform better than classic machine learning models, they meet the adoption criteria set by the practitioners only partially. Conclusions: This work provides evidence that the practitioners should be cautious while using the current state of the art models for production-level use-cases. It also highlights the need for standardization of performance benchmarks to ensure that bug localization models are assessed equitably and realistically.

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arXiv2019

Dogfooding: use IBM Cloud services to monitor IBM Cloud infrastructure

The stability and performance of Cloud platforms are essential as they directly impact customers' satisfaction. Cloud service providers use Cloud monitoring tools to ensure that rendered services match the quality of service requirements indicated in established contracts such as service-level agreements. Given the enormous number of resources that need to be monitored, highly scalable and capable monitoring tools are designed and implemented by Cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. Cloud monitoring tools monitor millions of virtual and physical resources and continuously generate logs for each one of them. Considering that logs magnify any technical issue, they can be used for disaster detection, prevention, and recovery. However, logs are useless if they are not assessed and analyzed promptly. Thus, we argue that the scale of Cloud-generated logs makes it impossible for DevOps teams to analyze them effectively. This implies that one needs to automate the process of monitoring and analysis (e.g., using machine learning and artificial intelligence). If the automation will witness an anomaly in the logs --- it will alert DevOps staff. The automatic anomaly detectors require a reliable and scalable platform for gathering, filtering, and transforming the logs, executing the detector models, and sending out the alerts to the DevOps staff. In this work, we report on implementing a prototype of such a platform based on the 7-layered architecture pattern, which leverages micro-service principles to distribute tasks among highly scalable, resources-efficient modules. The modules interact with each other via an instance of the Publish-Subscribe architectural pattern. The platform is deployed on the IBM Cloud service infrastructure and is used to detect anomalies in logs emitted by the IBM Cloud services, hence the dogfooding.

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arXiv2018

On Testing Quantum Programs

A quantum computer (QC) can solve many computational problems more efficiently than a classic one. The field of QCs is growing: companies (such as DWave, IBM, Google, and Microsoft) are building QC offerings. We position that software engineers should look into defining a set of software engineering practices that apply to QC's software. To start this process, we give examples of challenges associated with testing such software and sketch potential solutions to some of these challenges.

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arXiv2018

On Challenges of Cloud Monitoring

Cloud services are becoming increasingly popular: 60\% of information technology spending in 2016 was Cloud-based, and the size of the public Cloud service market will reach \$236B by 2020. To ensure reliable operation of the Cloud services, one must monitor their health. While a number of research challenges in the area of Cloud monitoring have been solved, problems are remaining. This prompted us to highlight three areas, which cause problems to practitioners and require further research. These three areas are as follows: A) defining health states of Cloud systems, B) creating unified monitoring environments, and C) establishing high availability strategies. In this paper we provide details of these areas and suggest a number of potential solutions to the challenges. We also show that Cloud monitoring presents exciting opportunities for novel research and practice.

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arXiv2018

Logchain: Blockchain-assisted Log Storage

During the normal operation of a Cloud solution, no one usually pays attention to the logs except technical department, which may periodically check them to ensure that the performance of the platform conforms to the Service Level Agreements. However, the moment the status of a component changes from acceptable to unacceptable, or a customer complains about accessibility or performance of a platform, the importance of logs increases significantly. Depending on the scope of the issue, all departments, including management, customer support, and even the actual customer, may turn to logs to find out what has happened, how it has happened, and who is responsible for the issue. The party at fault may be motivated to tamper the logs to hide their fault. Given the number of logs that are generated by the Cloud solutions, there are many tampering possibilities. While tamper detection solution can be used to detect any changes in the logs, we argue that critical nature of logs calls for immutability. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based log system, called Logchain, that collects the logs from different providers and avoids log tampering by sealing the logs cryptographically and adding them to a hierarchical ledger, hence, providing an immutable platform for log storage.

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arXiv2018

Architecture for Analysis of Streaming Data

While several attempts have been made to construct a scalable and flexible architecture for analysis of streaming data, no general model to tackle this task exists. Thus, our goal is to build a scalable and maintainable architecture for performing analytics on streaming data. To reach this goal, we introduce a 7-layered architecture consisting of microservices and publish-subscribe software. Our study shows that this architecture yields a good balance between scalability and maintainability due to high cohesion and low coupling of the solution, as well as asynchronous communication between the layers. This architecture can help practitioners to improve their analytic solutions. It is also of interest to academics, as it is a building block for a general architecture for processing streaming data.

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arXiv2018

Online and Offline Analysis of Streaming Data

Online and offline analytics have been traditionally treated separately in software architecture design, and there is no existing general architecture that can support both. Our objective is to go beyond and introduce a scalable and maintainable architecture for performing online as well as offline analysis of streaming data. In this paper, we propose a 7-layered architecture utilising microservices, publish-subscribe pattern, and persistent storage. The architecture ensures high cohesion, low coupling, and asynchronous communication between the layers, thus yielding a scalable and maintainable solution. This design can help practitioners to engage their online and offline use cases in one single architecture, and also is of interest to academics, as it is a building block for a general architecture supporting data analysis.

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arXiv2016

Towards Automated Performance Bug Identification in Python

Context: Software performance is a critical non-functional requirement, appearing in many fields such as mission critical applications, financial, and real time systems. In this work we focused on early detection of performance bugs; our software under study was a real time system used in the advertisement/marketing domain. Goal: Find a simple and easy to implement solution, predicting performance bugs. Method: We built several models using four machine learning methods, commonly used for defect prediction: C4.5 Decision Trees, Na\"ıve Bayes, Bayesian Networks, and Logistic Regression. Results: Our empirical results show that a C4.5 model, using lines of code changed, file's age and size as explanatory variables, can be used to predict performance bugs (recall=0.73, accuracy=0.85, and precision=0.96). We show that reducing the number of changes delivered on a commit, can decrease the chance of performance bug injection. Conclusions: We believe that our approach can help practitioners to eliminate performance bugs early in the development cycle. Our results are also of interest to theoreticians, establishing a link between functional bugs and (non-functional) performance bugs, and explicitly showing that attributes used for prediction of functional bugs can be used for prediction of performance bugs.

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arXiv2015

Ordering Interrogative Questions for Effective Requirements Engineering: The W6H Pattern

Requirements elicitation and requirements analysis are important practices of Requirements Engineering. Elicitation techniques, such as interviews and questionnaires, rely on formulating interrogative questions and asking these in a proper order to maximize the accuracy of the information being gathered. Information gathered during requirements elicitation then has to be interpreted, analyzed, and validated. Requirements analysis involves analyzing the problem and solutions spaces. In this paper, we describe a method to formulate interrogative questions for effective requirements elicitation based on the lexical and semantic principles of the English language interrogatives, and propose a pattern to organize stakeholder viewpoint concerns for better requirements analysis. This helps requirements engineer thoroughly describe problem and solutions spaces. Most of the previous requirements elicitation studies included six out of the seven English language interrogatives 'what', 'where', 'when', 'who', 'why', and 'how' (denoted by W5H) and did not propose any order in the interrogatives. We show that extending the set of six interrogatives with 'which' (denoted by W6H) improves the generation and formulation of questions for requirements elicitation and facilitates better requirements analysis via arranging stakeholder views. We discuss the interdependencies among interrogatives (for requirements engineer to consider while eliciting the requirements) and suggest an order for the set of W6H interrogatives. The proposed W6H-based reusable pattern also aids requirements engineer in organizing viewpoint concerns of stakeholders, making this pattern an effective tool for requirements analysis.

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