Dependability in the cloud: Challenges and opportunities

Cloud based infrastructures are rapidly becoming a destination of choice to host a variety of applications ranging from high availability enterprise services and online TV stations, to batch oriented scientific computations. With investments of billions of dollars, the fortunes of dozens of companies, and major research initiatives staked on its success, it is clear that cloud computing is here to stay. However, it is not yet clear whether cloud services can be a dependable alternative to dedicated infrastructure. On one hand, availability and privacy are serious challenges for applications hosted on cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, a cloud provider's economies of scale allow levels of investment in redundancy and dependability that are difficult to match for smaller operators. Furthermore, the ability to monitor large numbers of applications can enable “wisdom of crowds” approaches to provide enhanced security much in the same way that network providers have been able to do with worms and DDoS attacks. The panel will discuss new dependability related challenges and opportunities that arise in the context of cloud computing, some examples of which are as follows.