On improving the dependability of cloud applications with fault-tolerance

Cloud computing is an increasingly popular paradigm that allows individuals and enterprises to provision and deploy software applications over the Internet. Customers can lease services provided by these "cloud" applications (a.k.a cloud apps), ramping up or down the capacity as they need and paying only for what they use. Cloud apps are used in about every industry today; from financial, retail, education, and communications, to manufacturing, utilities and transportation. Forrester Research predicts that cloud apps sales will account for more than 16% of the total software market by 2016. However, cloud apps dependability is still a major issue for both providers and users. Failures of cloud apps generally result in big economic losses as core business activities now rely on them. In this position paper we discuss the current state of the dependability of cloud apps and advocate for the use of fault-tolerance mechanisms to improve the dependability of cloud apps.