Design of efficient and elastic storage in the cloud

Abstract

As cloud computing has gained fast popularity, it is timely and desirable to provide an efficient and elastic cloud storage service with similar capabilities as centralized database systems. Our research advances the current state-of-the-art by introducing three fundamental techniques for cloud data management. Firstly, we propose ecStore ? an elastic cloud storage system that can be dynamically deployed on top of cloud virtual infrastructures and support both OLTP and OLAP workloads that run simultaneously and interactively within the same storage. Secondly, we propose a simple but extensible and efficient distributed indexing framework that enables users to define their own indexes without knowing the structure of the underlying network or having to tune the performance by themselves. Thirdly, we propose a load-adaptive replication mechanism to provide both data availability and load balancing functionalities for the system. ecStore also provides transactional semantics for bundled read-modify-write operations spanning across multiple records.