Verifying the Availability of Cloud Applications

Cloud-based services provide a high level of flexibility and eliminate large up-front IT investments by trading capital expenditure for operational expenditure. However, performance, availability, and security still remain dominant barriers when deciding whether to move to the cloud or not. Although cloud providers already try to tackle these issues by offering SLAs and corresponding monitoring solutions, the ability of these solutions to control the performance of cloud-based services is still considered as unsatisfactory by consumers. In this paper, we present an approach for verifying availability guarantees from a consumer’s perspective, since availability is one of the very few performance parameters that is considered in the SLAs of today’s cloud providers. The aim of our research is to facilitate the verification of performance guarantees independently from a cloud provider, which will help to increase cloud service adoption in the future.