Towards database virtualization for database as a service

Advances in operating system and storage-level virtualization technologies have enabled the effective consolidation of heterogeneous applications in a shared cloud infrastructure. Novel research challenges arising from this new shared environment include load balancing, workload estimation, resource isolation, machine replication, live migration, and an emergent need of automation to handle large scale operations with minimal manual intervention. Given that databases are at the core of most applications that are deployed in the cloud, database management systems (DBMSs) represent a very important technology component that needs to be virtualized in order to realize the benefits of virtualization from autonomic management of data-intensive applications in large scale data-centers. The goal of this tutorial is to survey the techniques used in providing elasticity in virtual machine systems, shared storage systems, and survey database research on multitenant architectures and elasticity primitives. This foundation of core Database as a Service advances, together with a primer of important related topics in OS and storage-level virtualization, are central for anyone that wants to operate in this area of research.