Publication Details: UM-CS-2010-006

Dolly: Virtualization-driven Database Provisioning for the Cloud

Publication Type:Technical Report
Author(s):E. Cecchet, R. Singh, U. Sharma, P. Shenoy
Abstract:The Cloud is an increasingly popular platform for e-commerce applications that can be scaled on-demand in a very cost effective way. Dynamic provisioning is used to autonomously add capacity in multi-tier cloud-based applications that see workload increases. While many solutions exist to provision tiers with little or no state in applications, the database tier remains problematic for dynamic provisioning due to the need to replicate its large disk state.
In this paper, we analyze the challenges of provisioning shared-nothing replicated databases in the cloud. We evaluate various replica spawning techniques and argue that being able to determine state replication time is crucial for provisioning databases. We propose Dolly, a database provisioning system based on a virtual machine cloning technique to spawn database replicas in the cloud. We propose cost models to adapt the provisioning policy to the cloud infrastructure specifics and application requirements. We present an implementation of Dolly in a commercial-grade replication middleware and evaluate database provisioning strategies for a TPC-W workload on a private cloud and on Amazon EC2. By being aware of state replication cost, Dolly can do better automated provisioning for replicated databases on cloud platforms.
Document: [AVAILABLE HERE]
Submitted on:2010-01-26