Failure Process Characteristics of Cloud-Enabled Services

Abstract

The design of cloud computing technologies need to guarantee high levels of availability and for this reason there is a large interest in new fault tolerant techniques that are able to keep the resilience of the systems at the desired level. The modeling of these techniques require input information about the operational state of the systems that have a stochastic nature. The aim of this paper is to provide insights into the stochastic behavior of cloud services. By exploiting the willingness of service providers to publicly expose failure incident information on the web, we collected and analyzed dependability features of a large number of incident reports counting more than 10,600 incidents related to 106 services. Through the analysis of failure data information we provide some useful insights about the Poisson nature of cloud service's failure processes by fitting well known models and assessing their suitability.