Quartermaster: A Tool for Modeling and Simulating System Degradation

Abstract: It is essential that software systems be tolerant to degradations in components they rely on. There are patterns and techniques which software engineers use to ensure their systems gracefully degrade. Despite these techniques being available in practice, tuning and configuration is hard to get right and it is expensive to explore possible changes to components and techniques in complex systems. To fill these gaps, we propose Quartermaster to model and simulate systems and fault-tolerant techniques. We anticipate that Quartermaster will be useful to further research on graceful degradation and help inform software engineers about techniques that are most appropriate for their use cases.