Making Availability as a Service in the Clouds

Cloud computing has achieved great success in modern IT industry as an excellent computing paradigm due to its flexible management and elastic resource sharing. To date, cloud computing takes an irrepalceable position in our socioeconomic system and influences almost every aspect of our daily life. However, it is still in its infancy, many problems still exist.Besides the hotly-debated security problem, availability is also an urgent issue.With the limited power of availability mechanisms provided in present cloud platform, we can hardly get detailed availability information of current applications such as the root causes of availability problem,mean time to failure,etc. Thus a new mechanism based on deep avaliability analysis is neccessary and benificial.Following the prevalent terminology ‘XaaS’,this paper proposes a new win-win concept for cloud users and providers in term of ‘Availability as a Service’ (abbreviated as ‘AaaS’).The aim of ‘AaaS’ is to provide comprehensive and aimspecific runtime avaliabilty analysis services for cloud users by integrating plent of data-driven and modeldriven approaches. To illustrate this concept, we realize a prototype named ‘EagleEye’ with all features of ‘AaaS’. By subscribing corresponding services in ‘EagleEye’,cloud users could get specific availability information of their applications deployed in cloud platform. We envision this new kind of service will be merged into the cloud management mechanism in the near future.