Lightweight coordinated checkpointing in cloud computing

Abstract

Fault tolerance is actually an essential issue in cloud computing to face failures and minimize their damages. The checkpointing is a powerful fault tolerance technique that consists of saving the transient state of a computation system on a persistent storage from which the execution state can be restarted in case of failure. The coordinated checkpointing is an efficient checkpointing strategy because it is domino effect-free and it needs only the last stored checkpoint to ensure a consistent state. In this paper we propose a lightweight coordinated checkpointing for cloud computing that minimizes the overload of classical coordinated checkpointing by minimizing the number of the participating virtual machines (VMs) in each checkpointing interval. The experimental results prove that our proposal reduces the overload and improves the system performances.