Fault Tolerance Mechanisms and its Implementation in Cloud Computing – A Review

Cloud Computing, with its great potentials in low cost and on-demand services, is an auspicious computing platform for both commercial and non-commercial computation clients. Cloud Computing aims to provide reliable services within data centres that contain servers, storage and networks. The services are delivered to the users transparently without their need to know the details of the underlying software and hardware. One of the challenge for cloud computing is to ensure that the applications run without a hiatus in the services they provide to the users. With the increasing demand and benefits of cloud computing infrastructure, real time computations are performed on cloud infrastructure. In most of the real time cloud applications, processing on computing nodes are done remotely. So there are more chances of errors. On the other side, most of the real time systems are also safety critical and should be highly reliable. In this context, applications’ running on cloud requires fault tolerance abilities so that they can come over the impact of system failures and perform their functions correctly when failure occurs. This paper provides evaluation of study of various fault tolerance mechanisms, several fault tolerance model and their comparison among them. Keywords— Fault tolerance as a Service, System level Fault tolerance, Cloud Computing, Fault tolerance factors, Cloud Reliability, VM reliability, Fault Independence, Fault tolerance properties