Transactions a la carte - Implementation and Performance Evaluation of Transactional Support on Top of Amazon S3

Most providers of Cloud-based database services favor availability and processing performance over consistency and hence provide only limited transaction support. Guaranteeing strict consistency is left to application developers. In this paper, we present a flexible transactional framework built on top of Amazon S3. It is intended for processing structured data under consideration of user-defined ACID guarantees ranging from non-transactional data querying and updating to full transactional data processing ensuring strict ACID properties. It supports the development of Cloud-based database applications without explicitly writing code for transactions. Instead, transactional semantics are weaved-in automatically using aspect-oriented programming techniques. In this way, application developers as well as end-users profit from transactional guarantees without having to care about them.