DSSO 2014 - The First International Workshop on Dependability and Security of System Operation

A large amount of system downtime is caused by failures in processes on the system operation (or administration) level. An operations process is intended to prepare an environment for some activity involving a target system - installation, upgrade, reconfiguration, or the like. An operations process may be executed by scripts, operations tools, code (as in "infrastructure as code"), or humans, usually based on some specification.
With the rise of the Development-Operation (DevOps) and continuous delivery movements, the tempo of operations processes, the automation of these processes, and the possibility of concurrent and conflicting execution of several operations processes are all increasing. In the meantime, large-scale use of Infrastructure/Platforms as Services (IaaS/PaaS) and resource sharing in virtualisation introduces more uncertainties into the environment.
Dependability and security issues can come from anywhere in the process - the specification, the code/scripts/tools/human involved, the target system, or the environment. Failures need to be prevented, detected, diagnosed, recovered from, or tolerated in the context of system operation processes.
The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss dependability and security issues of system operation and techniques to reduce the downtime caused by these issues. Topics include but not limited to the following:
Architectures or systems impact on operations
Best practices and patterns in system operation
Canary testing and production environment testing
Dependability/Security in configuration management
Dependability/Security in disaster recovery and business continuity
Dependability/Security in Infrastructure as Code, Software Defined Infrastructure, Software Defined Networks
Dependability/Security in operating HPC or Map-Reduce clusters
Dependability/Security in release engineering, continuous build and deployment
Development-Operation (DevOps) process interactions
Experience reports and data analysis of real-world system operation
Error diagnosis and root cause analysis during system operation
Failure/Fault detection/prevention/tolerance during system operation
Test driven system operations
Tolerance of variability