On Cloud Service Reliability Enhancement with Optimal Resource Usage

An increasing number of companies are beginning to deploy services/applications in the cloud computing environment. Enhancing the reliability of cloud service has become a critical and challenging research problem. In the cloud computing environment, all resources are commercialized. Therefore, a reliability enhancement approach should not consume too much resource. However, existing approaches cannot achieve the optimal effect because of checkpoint image-sharing neglect, and checkpoint image inaccessibility caused by node crashing. To address this problem, we propose a cloud service reliability enhancement approach for minimizing network and storage resource usage in a cloud data center. In our proposed approach, the identical parts of all virtual machines that provide the same service are checkpointed once as the service checkpoint image, which can be shared by those virtual machines to reduce the storage resource consumption. Then, the remaining checkpoint images only save the modified page. To persistently store the checkpoint image, the checkpoint image storage problem is modeled as an optimization problem. Finally, we present an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. The algorithm exploits the data center network architecture characteristics and the node failure predicator to minimize network resource usage. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we extend the renowned cloud simulator Cloudsim and conduct experiments on it. Experimental results based on the extended Cloudsim show that the proposed approach not only guarantees cloud service reliability, but also consumes fewer network and storage resources than other approaches.