Using Configuration Semantic Features and Machine Learning Algorithms to Predict Build Result in Cloud-Based Container Environment

Yiwen Wu, Yang Zhang, Junsheng Chang, Bo Ding, Tao Wang, Huaimin Wang

Abstract: Container technologies are being widely used in large scale production cloud environments, of which Docker has become the de-facto industry standard. In practice, Docker builds often break, and a large amount of efforts are put into troubleshooting broken builds. Prior studies have evaluated the rate at which builds in large organizations fail. However, there is still a lack of early warning methods for predicting the Docker build result before the build starts. This paper provides a first attempt to propose an automatic method named PDBR. It aims to use the configuration semantic features extracted by AST and the machine learning algorithms to predict build result in the cloud-based container environment. The evaluation experiments based on more than 36,000 collected Docker builds show that PDBR achieves 73.45%-91.92% in F1 and 29.72%-72.16% in AUC. We also demonstrate that different ML classifiers have significant and large effects on the PDBR AUC performance.