Service-oriented replication strategies for improving quality-of-service in cloud computing: a survey

The recent years have witnessed significant interest in migrating different applications into the cloud platforms. In this context, one of the main challenges for cloud applications providers is how to ensure high availability of the delivered applications while meeting users’ QoS. In this respect, replication techniques are commonly applied to efficiently handle this issue. From the literature, according to the used granularity for replication there are two major approaches to achieve replication: either through replicating the service or the underlying data. The latter one is also known as Data-oriented Replication (DoR), while the former one is referred to as Service-oriented Replication (SoR). DoR is discussed extensively in the available literature and several surveys are already published. However, SoR is still at its infancy and there is a lack of research studies. Hence, in this paper we present a comprehensive survey of SoR strategies in cloud computing. We propose a classification of existing works based on the research methods they use. Then, we carried out an in-depth study and analysis of these works. In addition, a tabular representation of all relevant features is presented to facilitate the comparison of SoR techniques and the proposal of new enhanced strategies.