SATURN 2020

The Open Source Foundation for Application Security (OWASP) reports misconfiguration as one of the top 10 most critical web security risks. 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. For example, the March 13th, 2019 Facebook outage affecting millions of users was caused by a server configuration error. In addition to reliability, configuration errors also can lead to security issues. In 2017, a configuration error of Amazon S3 storage exposed the personal information of 200 million users. As cloud infrastructure becomes increasingly more complex with integrated AI and advanced data processing, human errors have become one of the major causes of failures in cloud and Internet systems. In this talk, Yuanyuan Zhou will focus on a few current challenges of the human dimension of cloud computing and management. Due to legacy solutions and other reasons, most of today's data center system management requirements (in particular system configuration) do not follow the primary design principles of human-computer interaction (HCI) – namely simplicity, feedback, and consistency – making cloud management error prone for system admins.