Published Date 10/24/12 9:01 AM
State monitoring is a functional building block for many distributed applications and services hosted in cloud data centers. Unfortunately, existing approaches to distributed state monitoring generally assume always-online distributed monitoring nodes and reliable internode communication — qualities that don’t necessarily scale in the cloud.
In a paper presented at the 2012 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Cloud Computing (Cloud 2012), researchers from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and the Georgia Institute of Technology introduce a new state-monitoring approach that tackles this challenge by exposing and handling communication dynamics such as message delay and loss in cloud environments. The researchers evaluated their approach in a prototype system. Experimental results showed that, even under severe message loss and delay, their approach consistently improves monitoring accuracy and, when applied to cloud application autoscaling, outperforms existing state-monitoring techniques in terms of the ability to correctly trigger dynamic provisioning.
“Reliable State Monitoring in Cloud Datacenters” and other papers from Cloud 2012 are available to IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.