CS Talk
Daniel Sokolowski, Amazon Web Services
Host: Ruzica Piskac
Title: Reliable Infrastructure as Code for Decentralized Organizations
Abstract:
IT must be both reliable and adaptable for organizations to thrive. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) plays a critical role in automating software operations, with developers using languages like TypeScript and Python to implement IaC programs. These programs are crucial for the reliability and security of deployed systems. However, current techniques for rapidly developing reliable IaC are lacking, which limits organizational agility. Developers specifically need better automation for deployment coordination and more effective tools for quality assurance, such as testing and verification.
My PhD addresses these challenges, contributing to both the coordination and testing of IaC programs. This talk will provide an overview of these contributions, with a primary focus on the quality assurance and testing of IaC programs. We built a dataset of 37,712 public IaC programs, revealing that very few include tests. Existing testing techniques are either slow and resource-intensive or require excessive development effort. To overcome these issues, we propose ACT, an extensible automated unit testing approach that enables rapid testing of IaC programs across hundreds of configurations, often without requiring additional test code.
Bio:
Daniel Sokolowski is an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon Web Services in NYC. He recently received his Ph.D. in Computer Science under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Guido Salvaneschi from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, which he began at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. Daniel’s research focuses on software engineering, with a recent emphasis on reliable Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for modern IT organizations. Rooted in IT and Aviation, Daniel’s professional background includes roles as a Software Engineer and Trainee at the Lufthansa Group, and as a Co-Founder and CTO at the software startup actified. For more details, visit http://dsoko.de.