Scalable and Highly Available Database Systems in the Cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing allows users to tap into a massive pool of shared computing resources such as servers, storage, and network. These resources are provided as a service to the users allowing them to “plug into the cloud” similar to a utility grid. The promise of the cloud is to free users from the tedious and often complex task of managing and provisioning computing resources to run applications. At the same time, the cloud brings several additional benefits including: a pay-as-you-go cost model, easier deployment of applications, elastic scalability, high availability, and a more robust and secure infrastructure.

One important class of applications that users are increasingly deploying in the cloud is database management systems. Database management systems differ from other types of applications in that they manage large amounts of state that is frequently updated, and that must be kept consistent at all scales and in the presence of failure. This makes it difficult to provide scalability and high availability for database systems in the cloud. In this thesis, we show how we can exploit cloud technologies and relational database systems to provide a highly available and scalable database service in the cloud.

The first part of the thesis presents RemusDB, a reliable, cost-effective high availability solution that is implemented as a service provided by the virtualization platform. RemusDB can make any database system highly available with little or no code modifications by exploiting the capabilities of virtualization. In the second part of the thesis, we present two systems that aim to provide elastic scalability for database systems in the cloud using two very different approaches. The three systems presented in this thesis bring us closer to the goal of building a scalable and reliable transactional database service in the cloud.