Towards fault propagation analysis in cloud computing ecosystems

Nowadays, Cloud Computing is a fundamental paradigm that provides computational resources as a service, on which users heavily rely. Cloud computing infrastructures behave as an ecosystem, where several actors play a crucial role. Unfortunately Cloud Computing Ecosystems (CCEs) are often affected by outages, such as those experienced by Amazon Web Service in the last years, that result from component faults that propagate through the whole CCE. Thus, there is still a need for approaches to improve CCEs' reliability. This paper discusses both existing approaches and open challenges for the dependability evaluation of CCEs, and the need for novel techniques and methodologies to prevent fault propagation within CCEs as a whole.