On the Behaviour of General-Purpose Applications on Cloud Storages

Managing data over cloud infrastructures raises novel challenges with respect to existing and well studied approaches such as ACID and long running transactions. One of the main requirements is to provide availability and partition tolerance in a scenario with replicas and distributed control. This comes at the price of a weaker consistency, usually called eventual consistency. These weak memory models have proved to be suitable in a number of scenarios, such as the analysis of large data with Map-Reduce. However, due to the widespread availability of cloud infrastructures, weak storages are used not only by specialised applications but also by general purpose applications. We provide a formal approach, based on process calculi, to reason about the behaviour of programs that rely on cloud stores. For instance, one can check that the composition of a process with a cloud store ensures `strong' properties through a wise usage of asynchronous message-passing

Scalable Persistent Storage for Erlang

The many core revolution makes scalability a key property. The RELEASE project aims to improve the scalability of Erlang on emergent commodity architectures with 100,000 cores. Such architectures require scalable and available persistent storage on up to 100 hosts. We enumerate the requirements for scalable and available persistent storage, and evaluate four popular Erlang DBMSs against these requirements. This analysis shows that Mnesia and CouchDB are not suitable persistent storage at our target scale, but Dynamo-like NoSQL DataBase Management Systems (DBMSs) such as Cassandra and Riak potentially are. We investigate the current scalability limits of the Riak 1.1.1 NoSQL DBMS in practice on a 100-node cluster. We establish for the first time scientifically the scalability limit of Riak as 60 nodes on the Kalkyl cluster, thereby confirming developer folklore. We show that resources like memory, disk, and network do not limit the scalability of Riak. By instrumenting Erlang/OTP and Riak libraries we identify a specific Riak functionality that limits scalability. We outline how later releases of Riak are refactored to eliminate the scalability bottlenecks. We conclude that Dynamo-style NoSQL DBMSs provide scalable and available persistent storage for Erlang in general, and for our RELEASE target architecture in particular

ElasTraS: An Elastic Transactional Data Store in the Cloud

Over the last couple of years, "Cloud Computing" or "Elastic Computing" has emerged as a compelling and successful paradigm for internet scale computing. One of the major contributing factors to this success is the elasticity of resources. In spite of the elasticity provided by the infrastructure and the scalable design of the applications, the elephant (or the underlying database), which drives most of these web-based applications, is not very elastic and scalable, and hence limits scalability. In this paper, we propose ElasTraS which addresses this issue of scalability and elasticity of the data store in a cloud computing environment to leverage from the elastic nature of the underlying infrastructure, while providing scalable transactional data access. This paper aims at providing the design of a system in progress, highlighting the major design choices, analyzing the different guarantees provided by the system, and identifying several important challenges for the research community striving for computing in the cloud.Comment: 5 Pages, In Proc. of USENIX HotCloud 200

BaseFs - Basically Acailable, Soft State, Eventually Consistent Filesystem for Cluster Management

A peer-to-peer distributed filesystem for community cloud management. https://github.com/glic3rinu/basef