Providing Dependability and Resilience in the Cloud: Challenges and Opportunities

Cloud Computing is a novel paradigm for providing data center resources as on-demand services in a pay-as-you-go manner. It promises significant cost savings by making it possible to consolidate workloads and share infrastructure resources among multiple applications resulting in higher cost- and energy-efficiency. However, these benefits come at the cost of increased system complexity and dynamicity posing new challenges in providing service dependability and resilience for applications running in a Cloud environment. At the same time, the virtualization of physical resources, inherent in Cloud Computing, provides new opportunities for novel dependability and quality-of-service management techniques that can potentially improve system resilience. In this chapter, we first discuss in detail the challenges and opportunities introduced by the Cloud Computing paradigm. We then provide a review of the state of the art in dependability and resilience management in Cloud environments, and conclude with an overview of emerging research directions.

1. 1.

   “Resilience Benchmarking”

2. 2.

   “Software Aging and Rejuvenation for Increased Resilience: Modeling, Analysis and Applications”

3. 3.

   “Failure Diagnosis of Complex Systems”

4. 4.

   “Scalable Stochastic Modelling”

5. 5.

   “Online Prediction”

6. 6.

   “Providing Dependability and Resilience in the Cloud: Case Studies”

The work of the first author was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant No. KO 3445/6-1. Jeremy Bradley and Anton Stefanek are supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council on the AMPS project (reference EP/G011737/1). Vlastimil Babka is supported by the Czech Science Foundation project GACR P202/10/J042.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76131 , Karlsruhe, Germany

   Samuel Kounev & Fabian Brosig

2. Institute of Computer Science, Free University Berlin, Takustr. 9, 14195 , Berlin, Germany

   Philipp Reinecke

3. Imperial College, London, UK

   Jeremy T. Bradley & Anton Stefanek

4. AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ, USA

   Kaustubh Joshi

5. Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

   Vlastimil Babka

6. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

   Stephen Gilmore

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Samuel Kounev .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Inst. Informatik, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, Berlin, 10099, Berlin, Germany

   Katinka Wolter

2. Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, 08540, New Jersey, USA

   Alberto Avritzer

3. Fac. Ciencias e Tecnologia, Depto. Engenharia Informatica, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, 3030-290, Portugal

   Marco Vieira

4. Newcastle University, Room 817, Claremont Tower, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE17RU, United Kingdom

   Aad van Moorsel

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