Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities of Cloud Stacks in Dynamic Resource Environments

Traditional cloud stacks are designed to tolerate server or rack-level failures, that are unpredictable and uncorrelated. � Such stacks successfully deliver highly-available cloud services at global scale. The increasing criticality of cloud services to the overall world economy is causing concern about the impact of power outages, cyber-attacks, configuration errors, or other causes of datacenter or larger-scale failures on cloud availability. Recent experience shows that these events can trigger cascading failures and global-scale service outages. We study the impact of correlated, datacenter resource failures, exploring distributed protocols (widely-used in Cassandra) across varied configurations and resource availability. Our study reveals that using such protocols to achieve high availability on resources with large-scale, correlated outages are costly in storage and update traffic, requiring replication factors of 10 or more. Further analysis reveals that this limitation arises from from inflexible replication and quorum.