An empirical analysis of intra- and inter-datacenter network failures for geo-distributed services

Abstract

As cloud services continue to grow, a key requirement is delivering an 'always-on' experience to end users. Of the several factors affecting service availability, network failures in the hosting datacenters have received little attention. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of intra-datacenter and inter-datacenter network failures from a service perspective. We describe an empirical study analyzing and correlating network failure events over an year across multiple datacenters in a service provider. Our broader goal is to outline steps leveraging existing network mechanisms to improve end-to-end service availability.