A Survey on Resiliency Techniques in Cloud Computing Infrastructures and Applications

Today’s businesses increasingly rely on cloud computing, which brings both great opportunities and challenges. One of the critical challenges is resiliency: disruptions due to failures (either accidental or because of disasters or attacks) may entail significant revenue losses (e.g., US$ 25.5 billion in 2010 for North America). Such failures may originate at any of the major components in a cloud architecture (and propagate to others): 1) the servers hosting the application; 2) the network interconnecting them (on different scales, inside a data center, up to wide-area connections); or 3) the application itself. We comprehensively survey a large body of work focusing on resilience of cloud computing, in each (or a combination) of the server, network, and application components. First, we present the cloud computing architecture and its key concepts. We highlight both the infrastructure (servers, network) and application components. A key concept is virtualization of infrastructure (i.e., partitioning into logically separate units), and thus we detail the components in both physical and virtual layers. Before moving to the detailed resilience aspects, we provide a qualitative overview of the types of failures that may occur (from the perspective of the layered cloud architecture), and their consequences. The second major part of the paper introduces and categorizes a large number of techniques for cloud computing infrastructure resiliency. This ranges from designing and operating the facilities, servers, networks, to their integration and virtualization (e.g., also including resilience of the middleware infrastructure). The third part focuses on resilience in application design and development. We study how applications are designed, installed, and replicated to survive multiple physical failure scenarios as well as disaster failures.