A survey of fault tolerance in cloud computing

Cloud computing has brought about a transformation in the delivery model of information technology from a product to a service. It has enabled the availability of various software, platforms and infrastructural resources as scalable services on demand over the internet. However, the performance of cloud computing services is hampered due to their inherent vulnerability to failures owing to the scale at which they operate. It is possible to utilize cloud computing services to their maximum potential only if the performance related issues of reliability, availability, and throughput are handled effectively by cloud service providers. Therefore, fault tolerance becomes a critical requirement for achieving high performance in cloud computing. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of fault tolerance-related issues in cloud computing; emphasizing upon the significant concepts, architectural details, and the state-of-art techniques and methods. The objective is to provide insights into the existing fault tolerance approaches as well as challenges yet required to be overcome. The survey enumerates a few promising techniques that may be used for efficient solutions and also, identifies important research directions in this area.