A study on fault tolerance methods in Cloud Computing

The emergence of Cloud Computing has brought new dimension to the world of information technology. Even though Cloud Computing provide various benefits like agility, on-demand provisioning of resources, reduced cost, multi-tenancy etc., there are risks and flaws associated with it. One key research challenge in Cloud Computing is to ensure continuous reliability and guaranteed availability of resources provided by it. So there is a need for a robust Fault Tolerant (FT) system in Cloud Computing. To better understand FT in Cloud Computing, it is essential to understand the different types of faults. In this paper, we highlight the basic concepts of fault tolerance by understanding the different FT policies like Reactive FT policy and Proactive FT policy and the associated FT techniques used on different types of faults. A study on various fault tolerant methods, algorithms, frameworks etc., has been carried out which are developed and implemented by research experts in this field. This is an area where lot of research is happening and these studies will guide us to build a robust FT technique in Cloud.