A Systematic Literature Review on Fault Injection Testing of Microservice Systems

This paper presents the first comprehensive review of techniques that pertain to Fault Injection Testing (FIT) of Microservice systems. FIT is a popular resilience engineering technique for examining the correctness and robustness of fault-tolerance mechanisms in software systems. Despite its wide adoption in building Microservice systems of high reliability, the techniques and tools that underpin effective fault injection have not yet been systematically reviewed. To this end, a general FIT framework that consists of five key components is first summarized, with each component indicating a key design decision that should be carefully determined. Then, a systematic literature review (SLR) is performed to investigate the current practices that address the challenges associated with each of these components. Finally, the potential limitations and future research directions of FIT for Microservice systems are discussed.