Toward a high availability cloud: Techniques and challenges

Cloud computing in its many forms has become the key computing-infrastructure that supports business and more recently governmental computing across the globe. With its geographical spread and value proposition comes the need to provide guaranteed level of availability in the infrastructure and in its services. Multicore processing, virtualization, distributed storage systems and an overarching management framework that enable a Cloud, offer a plethora of possibilities to provide high availability using commodity systems. Herein lie the opportunities and challenges discussed in this paper.