Experimental evaluation of software aging effects in the eucalyptus elastic block storage

The need for reliability, availability and performance has increased in modern applications, which need to handle rapidly growing demands while providing uninterrupted service. Cloud computing systems fundamentally provide access to large pools of data and computational resources. Eucalyptus is a software framework used to implement private clouds and hybrid-style Infrastructure as a Service. It implements the API Amazon Web Service (AWS), allowing interoperability with other AWS-based services. Elastic block storage is a technology which provides flexible allocation of remote storage volumes to the virtual machines running in a cloud computing environment. This work investigates the software aging effects on the Eucalyptus framework, considering workloads composed of intensive requests for attaching remote storage volumes to virtual machines. The results evidenced problems that may be harmful to system dependability and its performance due to RAM memory exhaustion and subsequent use of swap memory, besides high CPU utilization by the virtual machines and subsequent increase in the response time of applications running on the VMs.