A survey on software aging and rejuvenation in the cloud

The adoption of cloud computing for providing resource and delivering services is an irreversible trend. For most IT companies, the quality of provided services is strongly dependent on reliability and performance of the underlying cloud technologies. A widely studied problem that can greatly affect the user experience is runtime software aging, whose main countermeasure is a proactive maintenance action known as rejuvenation. This article reviews the effort conducted so far by the software aging and rejuvenation (SAR) community in the cloud domain. A set of 105 papers has been examined from three source digital libraries in order to have a clear view of the state of the art. The paper characterizes the cloud-related SAR literature according to four dimensions: the publication trends, the aging analysis methods and metrics, the rejuvenation solutions, the validation approach. Results witness an increasing interest in this area (with 58% of the studies published in the last 5 years), an equivalent role of measurement-based and model-based solutions for aging analysis (42 and 40 studies, respectively) and a prevalent interest for rejuvenation (76/105 of the studies deals with rejuvenation).