On the Performance Variability of Production Cloud Services

by Alexandru Iosup, Nezih Yigitbasi, and Dick Epema

Cloud computing is an emerging infrastructure paradigm that promises to eliminate the need for companies to maintain expensive computing hardware. Through the use of virtualization and resource time-sharing, clouds address with a single set of physical resources a large user base with diverse needs. Thus, clouds have the potential to provide their owners the benefits of an economy of scale and, at the same time, become an alternative for both the industry and the scientific community to self-owned clusters, grids, and parallel production environments. For this potential to become reality, the first generation of commercial clouds need to be proven to be dependable. In this work we analyze the dependability of cloud services. READ FULL ARTICLE (login required) »