Dependability in Federated Cloud Environments

Cloud Computing has emerged as a large-scale distributed system model for utility computing, whereby services are supplied on-demand. It has been proposed that Clouds are in the process of evolving from single, monolithic Clouds such as EC2 or Microsoft Azure serving many consumers to a federation of autonomous Clouds. However, there remain a number of research challenges in building dependable and robust Clouds; a critical research problem that has not yet to be fully understood. This paper discusses the issues and challenges surrounding Cloud dependability, and outlines research areas of opportunity for improving the dependability and robustness of federated Clouds.