Fault Tolerance in the Cloud

Cloud Computing is an emerging and innovative platform, which makes computing and storage available to the end-users as services. The cloud is a “blob” of unstructured resources that are classified into three domains: (a) applications (or software), (b) platform, and (c) infrastructure. The cloud is a merger of business and computing models, which makes it a very important scientific and business medium for the end-users. Cloud Computing has established a widespread adoption in various domains, such as research, business, health, e-commerce, agriculture, and social life. Recently, cloud computing has increasingly been employed for a wide range of applications in various research domains, such as agriculture, smart grids, e-commerce, scientific applications, healthcare, and nuclear science. In the “Market Trends” report by Gartner, it is estimated that the cloud-based business services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market will increase from $13.4 to $32.2 billion from 2011 to 2016. Similarly, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market is estimated to grow from $7.6 billion to $35.5 billion from 2011 to 2016. The cloud investments have delivered around $4 billion benefit yield in the last five years.