Toward Antifragile Cloud Computing Infrastructures

Cloud computing systems are rapidly growing in scale and complexity. They are also changing dynamically as a result of dynamic addition and removal of system components, different execution environments, common updates and upgrades, runtime repairs, mobility of devices and more. Such large-scale, complex and dynamic cloud environments are prone to failures and performance anomalies. Thus, dependability and resilience in cloud computing are of paramount importance to guarantee availability and reliability of services and application execution, even in the presence of large number of faulty components. Antifragility is the key to such techniques. It proposes that some systems could be strengthened by changes and faults instead of be weakened by them. In contrast to classical resilience methods, antifragile techniques aim to build systems that handle unpredictable and irregular events, while growing and getting stronger. Most of the classical resilience techniques are not sufficient to build highly available cloud infrastructures. In fact, they just resist shocks and stay the same. They should be complemented by some other aspects like learning from failure to built more elastic and stronger cloud infrastructures. This may represent the idea of building antfragile cloud systems. In this paper, we discuss the existing resilience techniques and propose a solution to design antifragile systems in cloud computing environments. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.