Study on Database Virtualization for Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Abstract

Advancements in operating system virtualization and storage virtualization technologies have enabled the effective consolidation of heterogeneous applications in a shared cloud infrastructure. Research challenges which are novel arising from this new shared environment include load balancing, resource isolation, workload estimation, live migration, machine replication, and an emergent need of automation to handle large scale operations with minimal manual intervention. Databases are at the core of most applications that are deployed in the cloud, database management systems (DBMSs) represent a very important technology component that needs to be virtualized in order to realize the benefits of virtualization from autonomic management of data-intensive applications in large scale data-centers. The goal of this paper is to survey the techniques used in providing elasticity in virtual machine systems, shared storage systems and survey on database research on multitenant architectures and elasticity primitives. Studying Database as a Service advances, together with study of related topics in OS and storage-level virtualization, as they are central for anyone that wants to operate in this area.

Keywords: virtualization, elasticity; live-migration; load-balancing; resource isolation; multitenant systems;