Investigation of amazon and google for fault tolerance strategies in cloud computing services

Cloud computing has recently become an attractive topic due to its ability to offer information technology solutions through virtual machines as on-demand services to share and consume resources over the Internet. As a result of rapid development in such services, the necessity of fault tolerance in the cloud is a major concern with reliability, availability and dependability is more critical to this new service type. This thesis investigates techniques and means of tolerating cloud services as well as cloud customers' systems/enterprises execution over the cloud safe from failures. As one of this findings shows, failures in cloud enabled services should be expected to occur hence they should be handled. The essential features of implementing fault tolerance strategies guarantee the business continuity, avoid financial lost, recovering systems from failures, and provide disaster recovery as well. The specific focus is to explore scenarios of avoiding/recovering from failures through redundancy, checkpoint and replication. Commercial IaaS providers such as Amazon's AWS and v Google's GCE are taken as examples as they tolerate their infrastructure from failures; in this way a robust architecture with fault tolerance property could be proposed for a system/enterprise. Hence, a general conceptual model with fault tolerance considerations has been proposed. With this basis, addressing potential failures in detail, implementing fault tolerance techniques, organizing teamwork to setup business policies are left for future work. Such limitations can be addressed through online questionnaires to collect information for case studies.