ShuttleDB: Database-Aware Elasticity in the Cloud

Motivated by the growing popularity of database-as-aservice clouds, this paper presents ShuttleDB, a holistic approach enabling flexible, automated elasticity of database tenants in the cloud. We first propose a database-aware live migration and replication method designed to work with off-the-shelf databases without any database engine modifications. We then combine these database-aware techniques with VM-level mechanisms to implement a flexible elasticity approach that can achieve efficient scale up, scale out, or scale back for diverse tenants with fluctuating workloads. Our experimental evaluation of the ShuttleDB prototype shows that by applying migration and replication techniques at the tenant level, automated elasticity can be achieved both intra- and inter-datacenter in a database agnostic way. We further show that ShuttleDB can reduce the time and data transfer needed for elasticity by 80% or more compared to tenant-oblivious approaches.