Failover strategy for fault tolerance in cloud computing environment

Cloud fault tolerance is an important issue in cloud computing platforms and applications. In the event of an unexpected system failure or malfunction, a robust fault‐tolerant design may allow the cloud to continue functioning correctly possibly at a reduced level instead of failing completely. To ensure high availability of critical cloud services, the application execution, and hardware performance, various fault‐tolerant techniques exist for building self‐autonomous cloud systems. In comparison with current approaches, this paper proposes a more robust and reliable architecture using optimal checkpointing strategy to ensure high system availability and reduced system task service finish time. Using pass rates and virtualized mechanisms, the proposed smart failover strategy (SFS) scheme uses components such as cloud fault manager, cloud controller, cloud load balancer, and a selection mechanism, providing fault tolerance via redundancy, optimized selection, and checkpointing. In our approach, the cloud fault manager repairs faults generated before the task time deadline is reached, blocking unrecoverable faulty nodes as well as their virtual nodes. This scheme is also able to remove temporary software faults from recoverable faulty nodes, thereby making them available for future request. We argue that the proposed SFS algorithm makes the system highly fault tolerant by considering forward and backward recovery using diverse software tools. Compared with existing approaches, preliminary experiment of the SFS algorithm indicates an increase in pass rates and a consequent decrease in failure rates, showing an overall good performance in task allocations. We present these results using experimental validation tools with comparison with other techniques, laying a foundation for a fully fault‐tolerant infrastructure as a service cloud environment. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.