Robust Cloud Monitor Placement for Availability Verification

While cloud computing provides a high level of flexibility, it also implies a shift of responsibility to the cloud provider and thus, a loss of control for cloud consumers. Although existing means such as service level agreements or monitoring solutions offered by cloud providers aim to address this issue, there is still a low degree of trust on consumer side that cloud providers properly measure compliance against SLAs. A solution lies in designing reliable means for monitoring cloud-based services from a consumer's perspective. We already proposed such a monitoring approach in our former work. However, our experiments revealed that our approach is sensitive to network impairments. Hence, in the work at hand, we introduce the Robust Cloud Monitor Placement Problem and present a formal optimization model. Based on the model, we propose an initial optimization approach, that allows to obtain an exact solution using off-the-shelf algorithms.