Failover time evaluation between checkpoint services in multi-tier stateful applications

Cloud applications are offered to users with high availability and minimal data loss. Any (hardware or software) failure must be detected and recovered quickly, in order to maintain customer trust and avoid financial losses. When we are dealing with multi-tier and stateful applications, the failure recovery process is a big challenge because the whole state of the failed application must be retrieved and restored in a new instance. This process is named as failover; it can be performed by a checkpoint service at application-level or at system-level. Depending on the location of the checkpoint data storage, it can be classified as non-collocated, collocated warm, or collocated hot. This work presents an evaluation between these two checkpoint services in both virtualized and physical environments, considering a multi-tier and stateful application.