Towards Reliable Configuration Management in Clouds: A Lightweight Consistency Validation Mechanism for Virtual Private Clouds

The virtual private cloud service currently lacks a real-time end-to-end consistency validation mechanism, which prevents tenants from receiving immediate feedback on their requests. Existing solutions consume excessive communication and computational resources in such large-scale cloud environments, and suffer from poor timeliness. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight consistency validation mechanism that includes real-time incremental validation and periodic full-scale validation. The former leverages message layer aggregation to enable tenants to swiftly determine the success of their requests on hosts with minimal communication overhead. The latter utilizes lightweight validation checksums to compare the expected and actual states of hosts locally, while efficiently managing the checksums of various host entries using inverted indexing. This approach enables us to efficiently validate the complete local configurations within the limited memory of hosts. In summary, our proposed mechanism achieves closed-loop implementation for new requests and ensures their long-term effectiveness.