Automated Synthesis of Cloud Emulators

2026-08-24

AI Summary

为解决DevOps程序测试耗时、不安全和成本高的问题，本文提出CloudEmu，通过神经符号代码合成自动生成云模拟器。

Abstract

DevOps programming (e.g., using CLI/API scripts or IaC frameworks) is key to cloud infrastructure management. Unlike traditional programming tasks, DevOps program testing needs provisioning and execution against actual cloud resources, which is often time-consuming, unsafe, and costly. Cloud emulators have gained popularity for easing DevOps program testing; they are generally API-level mocks that can execute DevOps programs in a local environment. Still, building these emulators remains challenging: developers must manually interpret extensive cloud documentation and handcraft logic for each service, API, and their interaction. This does not scale to the complexity of the cloud, which is further a moving target as the services and APIs evolve. CloudEmu is an automated approach that constructs emulators based on cloud documentation via neurosymbolic code synthesis. The key idea is to combine LLMs' general strengths in documentation understanding and code generation with cloud-specific symbolic abstractions that suppress hallucinations and enforce precision at scale, while using the real cloud as an oracle for automated testing, repair, and alignment. Our evaluation shows the effectiveness of CloudEmu on major cloud provider (AWS and GCP) services in both coverage and accuracy. CloudEmu outperforms the existing leading tool LocalStack, which was manually developed by a large team of engineers over a decade.

Problem

• DevOps
• cloud emulators
• API-level mocks
• cloud documentation
• code synthesis

Innovation

• neurosymbolic code synthesis
• cloud documentation
• automated testing
• LLMs
• cloud emulator