Software aging prediction and rejuvenation in cloud computing environment: a new approach

Abstract

Service availability is one of the major requirements for user satisfaction. Several researches were conducted in recent years to find suitable infrastructure to enhance the availability. Even though both hardware and software are to be in good condition, in recent years, software faults are the major concern for service availability. Software aging is a type of software fault. Software aging occurs as a result of errors accumulation in the internal environment of the system leading to performance degradation. To manage software aging, technique used is software rejuvenation. There exist two kinds of approaches for studying software aging and deriving optimal software rejuvenation schedules. The two approaches are measurement based and model based. In model based approach, analytic models are built for capturing system degradation and rejuvenation process. In measurement based approach, attributes are periodically monitored and that may indicate signs of software aging. In this work, a prototype of measurement based model has been developed. The model captures the aging indicator metrics from cloud environment and rejuvenates once the system reaches aged status. The proposed model uses platform independent, non-intrusive technique for capturing metrics. The rejuvenation carried out after analysing the captured metrics, increases the availability of the service.