A Review of Availability Mechanisms in Dynamic Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract

Cloud computing is arguably a ubiquitous technology in today’s digital age. The cloud has changed the way users utilize computing services such as applications and storage and thin clients is the buzzword in the fast changing consumer world of computing. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have been striving to achieve the magical five nines of availability, that is, 99.999% availability of the cloud. This has proven to be elusive due to outages in recent years and availability has been a major challenge to CSPs globally. Different engineers have come up with different mechanisms for increasing availability in the cloud but the numbers show that no single mechanism can increase availability effectively enough to achieve the magical five nines. This paper performs a survey of current common availability mechanisms with a view to highlighting the strength and weaknesses of each of these mechanisms and opines that perhaps engineers should now start thinking of multi-mechanism solutions in order to increase availability in the cloud.