Cloud computing has become the typical way to deliver enterprise applications. As today’s cloud infrastructure becomes more and more complex with hybrid cloud as well as AI and advanced data processing integrated in the platform, human errors has become one of the major causes of failures in cloud and Internet systems, as reported by many system vendors and service providers. While various fault tolerance and recovery mechanisms are useful in handling hardware and software failures, they are less effective in handling system administrators’ human errors. The very recent outage in Facebook on March 13th, 2019 was also caused by a server configuration error, affecting millions of users. In addition to reliability, configuration errors also can lead to security issues. OWASP reports misconfiguration as one of the top 10 most critical web security risks. In 2017, a configuration error of Amazon S3 storage exposed personal information of 200 million users. In this talk, I will focus a few current challenges on the human dimension of cloud computing and management. Due to legacy and various other reasons, most today’s data center system management requirement (in particular system configuration) do not follow the primary design principles of human-computer interaction (HCI), namely (i) simplicity, (ii) feedback, and (iii) consistency, making cloud management error prone for system admins.

Yuanyuan Zhou

University of California, San Diego

United States