A Model-Based Fault Tolerance Mechanism Development Approach for Cloud Computing

There are many different kinds of cloud computing platforms, such as CloudStack, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, and so on, which differentiate from each other in management abilities and management styles. Even in a particular cloud platform, there are also different kinds of virtualization technologies, such as Xen, KVM, VMware, etc. Recent years, with the rapid development of private cloud and hybrid cloud, the heterogeneity degree of infrastructure is aggravated. Fault tolerance (FT) mechanisms are usually supported by the management ability and management style of the infrastructure. As a result, a fault-tolerant mechanism needs to be repeatedly implemented on different platforms. Meanwhile, this directly causes the obvious growing difficulty and increasing amount of time consumption in FT mechanism. In order to reach the goal of achieving FT mechanism among different platforms, we propose a model-based, cross-platform FT mechanism development approach in this paper. To validate the effectiveness and practicability of model-based development approach, we implemente seven fault tolerance mechanisms in CloudStack and OpenStack. A series of experiments show that failover is implemented effectively by these FT mechanisms, and the reliability and availability of the FT target are improved. With high reusability (over 90%) of the code, the FT mechanisms in this thesis can function cross different platforms. Analysis of the questionnaire survey conducted among developers show that our approach can improve the development experience and development efficiency.