Despite a projected shift to cloud computing, heightened concerns over cloud reliability remain paramount in both private and government sectors, and urge innovative solutions to meet the growing challenge of disparate reliability requirements. While existing techniques allow cloud providers to offer some fixed level of reliability to all customers, it may be either inadequate or too expensive to fit their specific requirements. This project aims to develop a novel framework for providing reliability as an elastic, transparent service that can be customized and accessed by all customers in cloud computing.
The goals of this project are: (1) holistic integration of two reliability approaches (viz., checkpointing and replication) with utility optimization and their adaptation to a distributed cloud environment with heterogeneous user demands, (2) the development of pricing schemes for cloud providers to put their ?resource white spaces? to profitable use. These two research directions collaboratively enable the realization of Reliability as a Service (RaaS). With the introduction of pay-per-use reliability services, cloud customers could choose reliability components they require on a feature-by-feature basis. Achieving a desired reliability level could be a single check box away. For cloud service providers, RaaS presents an additional source of revenue and value to their services.
By constructing realistic models and developing algorithms for resource allocation and optimization and pricing, the proposed research is expected to advance the start of the art of cloud computing. The project also includes an implementation and experimental component that will yield valuable knowledge on best practices and the main obstacles towards transitioning the results into the commercial world. This project will also carry out a number of educational activities involving K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students, and make strong outreach efforts for recruiting and mentoring under-represented students.
