Zephyr: live migration in shared nothing databases for elastic cloud platforms

Multitenant data infrastructures for large cloud platforms hosting hundreds of thousands of applications face the challenge of serving applications characterized by small data footprint and unpredictable load patterns. When such a platform is built on an elastic pay-per-use infrastructure, an added challenge is to minimize the system’s operating cost while guaranteeing the tenants’ service level agreements (SLA). Elastic load balancing is therefore an important feature to enable scale-up during high load while scaling down when the load is low. Live migration, a technique to migrate tenants with minimal service interruption and no downtime, is critical to allow lightweight elastic scaling. We focus on the problem of live migration in the database layer. We propose Zephyr, a technique to efficiently migrate a live database in a shared nothing transactional database architecture. Zephyr uses phases of ondemand pull and asynchronous push of data, requires minimal synchronization, re...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Aaron J. Elmore, Sudipto Das, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi
• Keywords: Database, Database Management Systems, Information Storage And Retrieval, Relational Database Engine, SIGMOD 2011