Using Byzantine Fault-Tolerance to Improve Dependability in Federated Cloud Computing

Computing Clouds are typically characterized as large scale systems that exhibit dynamic behavior due to variance in workload. However, how exactly these characteristics affect the dependability of Cloud systems remains unclear. Furthermore provisioning reliable service within a Cloud federation, which involves the orchestration of multiple Clouds to provision service, remains an unsolved problem. This is especially true when considering the threat of Byzantine faults. Recently, the feasibility of Byzantine Fault-Tolerance within a single Cloud and federated Cloud environments has been debated. This paper investigates Cloud reliability and the applicability of Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Cloud computing and introduces a Byzantine fault-tolerance framework that enables the deployment of applications across multiple Cloud administrations. An implementation of this framework has facilitated in-depth experiments producing results comparing the reliability of Cloud applications hosted in a federated Cloud to that of a single Cloud.