Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
Conclusions
The advantages of the cloud computing paradigm opens up new avenues for
deploying novel applications which were not economically feasible in a traditional
enterprise infrastructure setting. Therefore, the cloud has become an increasingly
popular platform for hosting software applications in a variety of domains such as
e-retail, finance, news and social networking. Thus, we are witnessing a proliferation
in the number of applications with a tremendous increase in the scale of the
data generated as well as being consumed by such applications. Cloud-hosted
database systems powering these applications form a critical component in the
software stack of these applications. They play an important role in ensuring
the smooth deployment or migration of software applications from the traditional
enterprise infrastructures and on-premise data centers to the new cloud platforms
and infrastructures. In the previous chapter, we presented an overview of the
state-of-the-art of existing technologies for hosting the database tier of software
applications in cloud environments. We crystallized the design choices, strengths,
weaknesses of each technology. In this chapter, we shed the lights on a set of
research challenges, that have been introduced by the new wave of cloud-hosted
data storage systems that need to be addressed in order to ensure that the vision of
designing and implementing successful scalable data management solutions can be
achieved.
10.1
True Elasticity
A common characteristic of internet scale applications and services is that they can
be used by large numbers of end-users and highly variable load spikes in the demand
for services which can occur depending on the day and the time of year, and the
popularity of the application [
204
]. In addition, the workload characteristic could
vary significantly from one application type to another where possible fluctuations
on the workload characteristics which could be of several orders of magnitude on
the same business day may also occur [
83
]. In principle, elasticity and horizontal
