ElasTraS: An Elastic Transactional Data Store in the Cloud

TL;DR

ElasTraS is a scalable, elastic transactional data store designed for cloud environments, addressing the scalability limitations of traditional databases by leveraging cloud infrastructure's elasticity.

Contribution

The paper introduces ElasTraS, a novel system that enhances database elasticity and scalability in cloud computing, overcoming limitations of existing web-based data stores.

Findings

Design of ElasTraS system architecture

Analysis of transactional guarantees in ElasTraS

Identification of key challenges for cloud-based data stores

Abstract

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.