Model Discovery and Graph Simulation: A Lightweight Alternative to Chaos Engineering

📅 2025-06-12
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🤖 AI Summary
Microservice systems are prone to cascading failures due to strong inter-service dependencies, and conventional chaos engineering relies on costly fault injection in production environments. This paper proposes a lightweight cascading failure prediction method: it automatically constructs a high-fidelity service dependency graph from distributed tracing data and performs Monte Carlo–based stochastic fault propagation simulations on this graph to enable rapid resilience assessment at the design stage—without requiring real-world fault injection. We provide the first theoretical proof that the automatically derived dependency graph supports high-accuracy resilience prediction. Evaluation on a Social Network benchmark shows prediction errors ≤ 0.0004 against ground-truth measurements; mean absolute error (MAE) is 0.025 under no-replica configurations and exactly zero with replicas, demonstrating highly accurate availability estimation capability.

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📝 Abstract
Microservice applications are prone to cascading failures because of dense inter-service dependencies. Ensuring resilience usually demands fault-injection experiments in production-like setups. We propose extit{model discovery} -- an automated CI/CD step that extracts a live dependency graph from trace data -- and show that this lightweight representation is sufficient for accurate resilience prediction. Using the DeathStarBench Social Network, we build the graph, simulate failures via Monte-Carlo, and run matching chaos experiments on the real system. The graph model closely matches reality: with no replication, 16 trials yield an observed resilience of 0.186 versus a predicted 0.161; with replication, both observed and predicted values converge to 0.305 (mean absolute error leq 0.0004). These results indicate that even a simple, automatically discovered graph can estimate microservice availability with high fidelity, offering rapid design-time insight without full-scale failure testing.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Predict microservice resilience using lightweight dependency graphs
Automate dependency discovery from trace data for failure simulation
Reduce need for full-scale chaos testing with accurate graph models
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Automated model discovery from trace data
Lightweight dependency graph for resilience prediction
Monte-Carlo failure simulation matches real chaos experiments