Fex: A Software Systems Evaluator

Oleksii Oleksenko, Dmitrii Kuvaiskii, Pramod Bhatotia, Christof Fetzer

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Software systems research relies on experimental evaluation to assess the effectiveness of newly developed solutions. However, the existing evaluation frameworks are rigid (do not allow creation of new experiments), often simplistic (may not reveal issues that appear in real-world applications), and can be inconsistent (do not guarantee reproducibility of experiments across platforms). This paper presents Fex, a software systems evaluation framework that addresses these limitations. Fex is extensible (can be easily extended with custom experiment types), practical (supports composition of different benchmark suites and real-world applications), and reproducible (it is built on container technology to guarantee the same software stack across platforms). We show that Fex achieves these design goals with minimal end-user effort-for instance, adding Nginx web-server to evaluation requires only 160 LoC. Going forward, we discuss the architecture of the framework, explain its interface, show common usage scenarios, and evaluate the efforts for writing various custom extensions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 47th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2017
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages543-550
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781538605417
DOIs
StatePublished - 30 Aug 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event47th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2017 - Denver, United States
Duration: 26 Jun 201729 Jun 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings - 47th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2017

Conference

Conference47th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDenver
Period26/06/1729/06/17

Keywords

  • Benchmarks
  • experiment automation
  • performance

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Fex: A Software Systems Evaluator'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this