Kivi: Verification for Cluster Management

Modern cloud infrastructure is powered by cluster management systems such as Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. While these systems seek to minimize users’ operational burden, the complex, dynamic, and non-deterministic nature of these systems makes them hard to reason about, potentially leading to failures ranging from performance degradation to outages.

We present Kivi, the first system for verifying controllers and their configurations in cluster management systems. Kivi focuses on the popular system Kubernetes, and models its controllers and events into processes whereby their interleavings are exhaustively checked via model checking. Central to handling autoscaling and large-scale deployments are our modeling optimizations and our design which seeks to find violations in a smaller and reduced topology. We show that Kivi is effective and accurate in finding issues in realistic and complex scenarios and showcase two new issues in Kubernetes controller source code.