Improving MapReduce fault tolerance in the cloud

MapReduce has been used at Google, Yahoo, FaceBook etc., even for their production jobs. However, according to a recent study, a single failure on a Hadoop job could cause a 50% increase in completion time. Amazon Elastic MapReduce has been provided to help users perform data-intensive tasks for their applications. These applications may have high fault tolerance and/or tight SLA requirements. However, MapReduce fault tolerance in the cloud is more challenging as topology control and (data) rack locality currently are not possible. In this paper, we investigate how redundent copies can be provisioned for tasks to improve MapReduce fault tolerance in the cloud while reducing latency.