ABSTRACT
Cloud computing over years has presented an alternative to traditional computing for organizations and individuals by providing resources and services through a pay-per-use model as supposed to owning them. Other notable features of the cloud are rapid elasticity, on-demand self-service, and resource pooling. Virtualization is one of the enabling technologies driving cloud computing that creates a software abstraction between the computer hardware and the operating system (OS). This abstraction layer is known as hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) and is responsible for processing, allocating, and releasing resources as demanded. It also enables multi-tenancy by allowing multiple virtual machines to coexist in the same physical machine to share resources. Notwithstanding all the numerous benefits of cloud computing, one major factor that can affect its general adoption is the availability of cloud services and resources. Availability, one of the security triads, ensures that there is no interruption of service leading to the inability of the user to access computing services and resources. Maintaining high availability in the cloud involves ensuring that authorized cloud users have access to the cloud service and resources as demanded. Among the factors that affect cloud availability are malicious attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), weak cloud infrastructure, component failure, and critical application failure. In this work, we consider the availability of cloud services with regards to security and infrastructure failure and propose a conceptual smart virtual machine (VM) pre-copy live migration that migrates a virtual machine between two physical machines.
