Towards an Evaluation Framework for Availability Solutions in the Cloud

The Cloud is a new computing paradigm for providing computing services. It has many benefits such as cost efficiency, better resource utilization and scalability. However, critical businesses (e.g. Telecommunication industry) have major concerns about the availability of their services in the Cloud. Different availability solutions can be used for the services in the Cloud. These solutions provide different protection mechanisms against failures at different layers (applications, virtual resources, physical hosts). In this paper we provide a framework for the evaluation of availability solutions. We determine the different aspects that should be taken into account for protecting services in the Cloud and therefore for evaluating potential solutions. We put this framework into practice, we investigate and evaluate a set of availability solutions based on the existing Cloud and availability related components, including Open Stack, VM ware technologies and OpenSAF.