Software Rejuvenation in Cloud Systems

Cloud computing is a promising paradigm able to rationalize the use of hardware resources by means of virtualization. Virtualization allows to instantiate one or more virtual machines (VMs) on top of a single physical machine managed by a virtual machine monitor (VMM). Similarly to any other software, a VMM experiences aging and failures. Software rejuvenation is a proactive fault management technique that involves terminating an application, cleaning up the system internal state, and restarting it to prevent the occurrence of future failures. Adopting Software rejuvenation techniques in Cloud computing is a new research frontier with challenging problems related to the complexity and the distributed nature of Cloud itself.