An untold story of redundant clouds: Making your service deployment truly reliable

Abstract

To enhance the reliability of cloud services, many application providers leverage multiple cloud providers for redundancy. Unfortunately, such techniques fail to recognize that seemingly independent redundant clouds may share third-party infrastructure components, e.g., power sources and Internet routers, which could potentially undermine this redundancy. This paper presents iRec, a cloud independence recommender system. iRec recommends at best-effort independent redundancy services to application providers based on their requirements, minimizing costly and ineffective redundancy deployments. At iRec's heart lies a novel protocol that calculates the weighted number of overlapping infrastructure components among different cloud providers, while preserving the secrecy of each cloud provider's proprietary information. We sketch the iRec design, and discuss challenges and practical issues. © 2013 ACM.