Reliability-Based Software Rejuvenation Scheduling for Cloud-Based Systems
Jean Rahme, Haiping Xu · Proceedings/Proceedings of the ... International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2015
The reliability and availability of a cloud-based system play an important role in evaluating its system performance.Due to the promised high reliability of physical facilities provided for cloud services, software faults have become a major factor for failures of cloud-based systems.In this paper, we focus on the software aging phenomenon where system performance may be progressively degraded due to exhaustion of system resources, fragmentation and accumulation of errors.We present a proactive technique, called software rejuvenation, to counteract the software aging problem.The dynamic fault tree (DFT) formalism is adopted to model the system reliability before and during a software rejuvenation process in an aging cloud-based system.Then it is converted into Markov Chains to derive the system reliability function.We use a case study of a cloud-based system to illustrate the validity of our approach.Based on the reliability analysis results, we show how to estimate software rejuvenation schedules that can keep the system reliability above a predefined critical level for required system availability.