skip to main content
10.1145/3643991.3645079acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Open access

Does Generative AI Generate Smells Related to Container Orchestration?: An Exploratory Study with Kubernetes Manifests

Published: 02 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as ChatGPT have shown promise in solving software engineering problems. However, these technologies have also shown to be susceptible to generating software artifacts that contain quality issues. A systematic characterization of quality issues, such as smells in ChatGPT-generated artifacts can help in providing recommendations for practitioners who use generative AI for container orchestration.
We conduct an empirical study with 98 Kubernetes manifests to quantify smells in manifests generated by ChatGPT. Our empirical study shows: (i) 35.8% of the 98 Kubernetes manifests generated include at least one instance of smell; (ii) two types of objects Kubernetes namely, Deployment and Service are impacted by identified smells; and (iii) the most frequently occurring smell is unset CPU and memory requirements. Based on our findings, we recommend practitioners to apply quality assurance activities for ChatGPT-generated Kubernetes manifests prior to using these manifests for container orchestration.

References

[1]
Anonymous. 2024. K8s-Pod-Example-1. https://chat.openai.com/share/0cee78c4-4290-4bc0-9f2a-a492859d6281. [Online; accessed 20-January-2024].
[2]
Agathe Blaise and Filippo Rebecchi. 2022. Stay at the Helm: secure Kubernetes deployments via graph generation and attack reconstruction. In 2022 IEEE 15th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD). 59--69.
[3]
Dibyendu Brinto Bose, Akond Rahman, and Shazibul Islam Shamim. 2021. 'Under-reported' Security Defects in Kubernetes Manifests. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Workshop on Engineering and Cybersecurity of Critical Systems (EnCyCriS). IEEE, 9--12.
[4]
Canonical. 2021. Kubernetes and cloud native operations report 2021. https://juju.is/cloud-native-kubernetes-usage-report-2021
[5]
Dev Nag. 2023. Overcoming the Kubernetes Skills Gap with ChatGPT Assistance. https://thenewstack.io/overcoming-the-kubernetes-skills-gap-with-chatgpt-assistance/. [Online; accessed 18-November-2023].
[6]
Jayne Groll. 2022. IT talent: 4 ways to address a Kubernetes skills shortage. https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2022/3/address-kubernetes-skills-shortage. [Online; accessed 19-June-2023].
[7]
KubeLinter. 2024. Introduction - KubeLinter. https://docs.kubelinter.io/. [Online; accessed 19-January-2024].
[8]
Kubernetes. 2021. Production-Grade Container Orchestration. https://kubernetes.io/
[9]
Kubernetes. 2023. Case Study: Capital One. https://kubernetes.io/case-studies/capital-one/. [Online; accessed 10-June-2023].
[10]
Janae Lee. 2022. How to beat the Kubernetes skills shortage. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3679749/how-to-beat-the-kubernetes-skills-shortage.html. [Online; accessed 18-June-2023].
[11]
S. Miles. 2020. Kubernetes: A Step-By-Step Guide For Beginners To Build, Manage, Develop, and Intelligently Deploy Applications By Using Kubernetes (2020 Edition). Independently Published. https://books.google.com/books?id=M4VmzQEACAAJ
[12]
Nhan Nguyen and Sarah Nadi. 2022. An empirical evaluation of GitHub copilot's code suggestions. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories. 1--5.
[13]
OpenAI. 2022. ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/. [Online; accessed 12-November-2023].
[14]
OpsCruise. 2023. Exploiting ChatGPT for TroubleShooting Kubernetes Problems. https://www.opscruise.com/newsroom-post/exploiting-chatgpt-for-troubleshooting-kubernetes-problems#. [Online; accessed 17-November-2023].
[15]
Akond Rahman. 2023. Verifiability Package for Paper. [Online; accessed 10-December-2023].
[16]
Akond Rahman and Chris Parnin. 2023. Detecting and Characterizing Propagation of Security Weaknesses in Puppet-based infrastructure Management. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (2023), 1--18.
[17]
Akond Rahman, Shazibul Islam Shamim, Dibyendu Brinto Bose, and Rahul Pandita. 2023. Security Misconfigurations in Open Source Kubernetes Manifests: An Empirical Study. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 32, 4, Article 99 (may 2023), 36 pages.
[18]
Renjith Ravindranathan. 2023. ChatGPT for your Kubernetes Cluster --- k8sgpt. https://medium.com/techbeatly/chatgpt-for-your-kubernetes-cluster-k8sgpt-649f2cad1bd5. [Online; accessed 19-November-2023].
[19]
Markets N Research. 2023. Case Study: OpenAI. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/03/06/2621358/0/en/Latest-Global-Kubernetes-Market-Size-Share-Worth-USD-7-8-Billion-by-2030-at-an-23-40-CAGR-Markets-N-Research-Share-Trends-Cap-Adoption-Forecast-Segmentation-Growth-Value.html. [Online; accessed 12-June-2023].
[20]
Baptiste Rozière, Jonas Gehring, Fabian Gloeckle, Sten Sootla, Itai Gat, Xiaoqing Ellen, Yossi Adi, Jingyu Liu, Tal Remez, Jérémy Rapin, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Ivan Evtimov, Joanna Bitton, Manish Bhatt, Cristian Canton Ferrer, Aaron Grattafiori, Wenhan Xiong, Alexandre Défossez, Jade Copet, Faisal Azhar, Hugo Touvron, Louis Martin, Nicolas Usunier, Thomas Scialom, and Gabriel Synnaeve. 2023. Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code. (2023).
[21]
Johnny Saldaña. 2015. The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Sage.
[22]
Daniel Schlagwein and Leslie Willcocks. 2023. 'ChatGPT et al.': The ethics of using (generative) artificial intelligence in research and science., 232--238 pages.
[23]
M. Islam Shamim, F. Ahamed Bhuiyan, and A. Rahman. 2020. XI Commandments of Kubernetes Security: A Systematization of Knowledge Related to Kubernetes Security Practices. In 2020 IEEE Secure Development (SecDev). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 58--64.
[24]
Tao Xiao, Christoph Treude, Hideaki Hata, and Kenichi Matsumoto. 2024. DevGPT: Studying Developer-ChatGPT Conversations. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2024).

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Gen-Optimizer: A Generative AI Framework for Strategic Business Cost OptimizationComputers10.3390/computers1402005914:2(59)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2025

Index Terms

  1. Does Generative AI Generate Smells Related to Container Orchestration?: An Exploratory Study with Kubernetes Manifests

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    MSR '24: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories
    April 2024
    788 pages
    ISBN:9798400705878
    DOI:10.1145/3643991
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 02 July 2024

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. container orchestration
    2. empirical study
    3. kubernetes
    4. quality
    5. smell

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    Conference

    MSR '24
    Sponsor:

    Upcoming Conference

    ICSE 2025

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)124
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)32
    Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)Gen-Optimizer: A Generative AI Framework for Strategic Business Cost OptimizationComputers10.3390/computers1402005914:2(59)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2025

    View Options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Login options

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media