Section: Scientific Foundations

Cloud Data Management

Cloud computing encompasses on demand, reliable services provided over the Internet (typically represented as a cloud) with easy access to virtually infinite computing, storage and networking resources. Through very simple Web interfaces and at small incremental cost, users can outsource complex tasks, such as data storage, system administration, or application deployment, to very large data centers operated by cloud providers. Thus, the complexity of managing the software/hardware infrastructure gets shifted from the users' organization to the cloud provider. From a technical point of view, the grand challenge is to support in a cost-effective way the very large scale of the infrastructure which has to manage lots of users and resources with high quality of service.

Cloud customers could move all or part of their information technology (IT) services to the cloud, with the following main benefits:

• Cost. The cost for the customer can be greatly reduced since the IT infrastructure does not need to be owned and managed; billing is only based only on resource consumption. For the cloud provider, using a consolidated infrastructure and sharing costs for multiple customers reduces the cost of ownership and operation.

• Ease of access and use. The cloud hides the complexity of the IT infrastructure and makes location and distribution transparent. Thus, customers can have access to IT services anytime, and from anywhere with an Internet connection.

• Quality of Service (QoS). The operation of the IT infrastructure by a specialized provider that has extensive experience in running very large infrastructures (including its own infrastructure) increases QoS.

• Elasticity. The ability to scale resources out, up and down dynamically to accommodate changing conditions is a major advantage. In particular, it makes it easy for customers to deal with sudden increases in loads by simply creating more virtual machines.

However, cloud computing has some drawbacks and not all applications are good candidates for being “cloudified”. The major concern is wrt. data security and privacy, and trust in the provider (which may use no so trustful providers to operate). One earlier criticism of cloud computing was that customers get locked in proprietary clouds. It is true that most clouds are proprietary and there are no standards for cloud interoperability. But this is changing with open source cloud software such as Hadoop, an Apache project implementing Google's major cloud services such as Google File System and MapReduce, and Eucalyptus, an open source cloud software infrastructure, which are attracting much interest from research and industry.

There is much more variety in cloud data than in scientific data since there are many different kinds of customers (individuals, SME, large corporations, etc.). However, we can identify common features. Cloud data can be very large, unstructured (e.g. text-based) or semi-structured, and typically append-only (with rare updates). And cloud users and application developers may be in high numbers, but not DBMS experts.

Current cloud data management (NOSQL) solutions typically trade consistency for scalability, simplicity and flexibility. They use a radically different architecture than RDBMS, by exploiting (rather than embedding) a distributed file system such as Google File System (GFS) or Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), to store and manage data in a highly fault-tolerant manner. They tend to rely on a more specific data model, e.g. key-value store such Google Bigtable, Hadoop Hbase or Apache CouchDB) with a simple set of operators easy to use from a programming language. For instance, to address the requirements of social network applications, new solutions rely on a graph data model and graph-based operators. User-defined functions also allow for more specific data processing. MapReduce is a good example of generic parallel data processing framework, on top of a distributed file system (GFS or HDFS). It supports a simple data model (sets of (key, value) pairs), which allows user-defined functions (map and reduce). Although quite successful among developers, it is relatively low-level and rigid, leading to custom user code that is hard to maintain and reuse. In Zenith, we exploit or extend these NOSQL technologies to fit our needs for scientific workflow management and scalable data analysis.