Evaluation and design of highly reliable and highly utilized cloud computing systems

Abstract

Cloud computing paradigm has ushered in the need to provide resources to users in a scalable, flexible, and transparent fashion much like any other utility. This has led to a need for developing evaluation techniques that can provide quantitative measures of reliability of a cloud computing system (CCS) for efficient planning and expansion. This paper presents a new, scalable algorithm based on non-sequential Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) to evaluate large scale cloud computing system (CCS) reliability, and it develops appropriate performance measures. Also, a new iterative algorithm is proposed and developed that leverages the MCS method for the design of highly reliable and highly utilized CCSs. The combination of these two algorithms allows CCSs to be evaluated by providers and users alike, providing a new method for estimating the parameters of service level agreements (SLAs) and designing CCSs to match those contractual requirements posed in SLAs. Results demonstrate that the proposed methods are effective and applicable to systems at a large scale. Multiple insights are also provided into the nature of CCS reliability and CCS design.