Anvil: Verifying Liveness of Cluster Management Controllers

Explore a groundbreaking 17-minute conference talk from OSDI '24 that introduces Anvil, a revolutionary framework for verifying the liveness of cluster management controllers. Delve into the critical importance of controllers in modern cloud ecosystems and the challenges they face due to concurrency, asynchrony, and failures. Discover how Anvil applies formal verification to ensure controller correctness through a novel specification called "eventually stable reconciliation." Learn about the implementation of Anvil in Rust and its successful application in verifying three Kubernetes controllers for managing ZooKeeper, RabbitMQ, and FluentBit. Gain insights into how these verified controllers compare to widely used unverified alternatives in terms of features and performance. Understand the significance of this research in advancing the reliability and stability of cloud infrastructure management.