A Comparative Cost Study of Fault-Tolerant Techniques for Availability on the Cloud

The success of ever growing warehouse-sized Cloud data centers built to respond to the increasing demand for computing resources depends on the ability to provide reliability and availability at scale. In order to provide dependable and secure systems and services, one needs to implement security controls capable of avoiding, coping and recovering from failures. However, dependability and security of services at all cost is not a solution for Cloud providers. In this paper, two state-of-the-art fault-tolerance techniques are compared in terms of availability of services to consumers, and energy costs to Cloud providers. The results have shown that proactive fault-tolerance technique outperforms traditional redundancy in terms of cost to Cloud users, while providing available compute environments and services to consumers.