Cloud services are critical to society. However, their reliability is poorly understood. Towards solving the problem, we propose a standard repository for cloud uptime data. We populate this repository with the data we collect containing failure reports from users and operators of cloud services, web services, and online games. The multiple vantage points help reduce bias from individual users and operators. We compare our new data to existing failure data from the Failure Trace Archive and the Google cluster trace. We analyze the MTBF and MTTR, time patterns, failure severity, user-reported symptoms, and operator-reported symptoms of failures in the data we collect. We observe that high-level user facing services fail less often than low-level infrastructure services, likely due to them using fault-tolerance techniques. We use simulation-based experiments to demonstrate the impact of different failure traces on the performance of checkpointing and retry mechanisms. We release the data, and the analysis and simulation tools, as open-source artifacts available athttps://github.com/atlarge-research/cloud-uptime-archive.

Traditional datacenter analysis is based on high-level, coarse-grained metrics. This obscures our vision of datacenter behavior, as we do not observe the full picture nor subtleties that might make up these high-level, coarse metrics. There is room for operational improvement based on fine-grained temporal and spatial, low-level metric data. We leverage in this work one of the (rare) public datasets providing fine-grained information on datacenter operations, with over 60 billion measurements captured in 15-second intervals. We show evidence that fine-grained information reveals new operational aspects, that the different metrics cannot be derived from one another (and thus need to be captured), and that many low-level metrics, gathered frequently are key to understanding datacenter operations. We propose a holistic analysis for datacenter operations, providing statistical characterization of node and workload aspects. Our analysis reveals both generic and machine learning-specific aspects, summarized in over 30 observations, providing deep insight into this dataset and the originating cluster. We give actionable insights, surprising findings, and exemplify how our observations support performance-engineering tasks such as workload prediction and long-term datacenter design.