The Case for Limping-Hardware Tolerant Clouds

With the advent of cloud computing, thousands of machines are connected and managed collectively. This era is confronted with a new challenge: performance variability, primarily caused by large-scale management issues such as hardware failures, software bugs, and configuration mistakes. In this paper, we highlight one overlooked cause: limping hardware—hardware whose performance degrades significantly compared to its specification. We present numerous cases of limping disks, network and processors seen in production, along with the negative impacts of such failures on existing large-scale distributed systems. From these findings, we advocate the concept of limping-hardware tolerant clouds.