Fujitsu develops cloud operations technology for mission critical processes

Fujitsu Laboratories announced the development of cloud operations technology aimed at realizing a cloud that can be safely used without delaying or stopping customer processes due to maintenance.

When cloud service operators perform maintenance, it is necessary to take measures such as moving the customers' virtual machines to another server, but this could have effects such as stopping or delaying customer processes.

For this reason, it has been difficult to utilize the cloud for mission-critical processes.

Now, Fujitsu Laboratories has supposedly developed technology to predict the degree of impact on customer processes, based on load patterns on virtual machines and on maintenance, as calculated by machine learning.

Moreover, the technology will automatically and quickly create maintenance plans that avoid impact on customer processes.

This technology will enable cloud operations that do not stop or delay customers' mission-critical processes, thereby supporting cloud utilization by customers running processes that require more stable operations.

Fujitsu Limited aims to make this technology available as a service during fiscal 2018, functioning to support the operation of its Fujitsu Cloud Service K5.

With the prevalence of the cloud in recent years, there has been an increasing demand to migrate mission-critical processes to the cloud.

 With public clouds, however, there are circumstances in which maintenance is conducted regardless of customer's schedule, which may cause delays or have other consequences on processes.

In order to create a cloud that customers can safely use for important processes, there has been a demand for cloud operations that provide stable functionality even during maintenance.

In a simulation based on the operational data of a commercial cloud with about 5,000 VMs, where each VM was utilizing over 90% of its CPU resources for 80% of the time, while its utilization was low for 20% of the time, the results showed that with previous technology, a total of 425 VMs were subjected to maintenance while their process load was high, impacting those processes.

This new technology, however, enables maintenance while avoiding high process load periods for all VMs.