Fault Tolerance Management in Cloud Computing: A System-Level Perspective

The increasing popularity of Cloud computing as an attractive alternative to classic information processing systems has increased the importance of its correct and continuous operation even in the presence of faulty components. In this paper, we introduce an innovative, system-level, modular perspective on creating and managing fault tolerance in Clouds. We propose a comprehensive high-level approach to shading the implementation details of the fault tolerance techniques to application developers and users by means of a dedicated service layer. In particular, the service layer allows the user to specify and apply the desired level of fault tolerance, and does not require knowledge about the fault tolerance techniques that are available in the envisioned Cloud and their implementations.