PolarDBMS: Towards a cost-effective and policy-based data management in the cloud

The proliferation of Cloud computing has attracted a large variety of applications which are completely deployed on resources of Cloud providers. As data management is an essential part of these applications, Cloud providers have to deal with many different requirements for data management, depending on the characteristics and guarantees these applications are supposed to have. The objective of a Cloud provider is to support these diverse requirements with a basic set of customizable modules and protocols that can be (dynamically) combined. With the pay-as-you-go cost model of the Cloud, literally each user action and resource usage has a price tag attached to it. Thus, for the application providers, it is essential that the needs of their applications are provided in a cost-optimized manner. In this paper, we present the work in progress PolarDBMS, a flexible and dynamically adaptable system for managing data in the Cloud. PolarDBMS derives policies from application and service objectives. Based on these policies, it will automatically deploy the most efficient and cost-optimized set of modules and protocols and monitor their compliance. If necessary, the modules and/or their customization is changed dynamically at run-time. Several modules and protocols that have already been developed are presented. Additionally, we discuss the challenges that have to be met to fully implement PolarDBMS.