Consistent and Fault-Tolerant Management of Big Data in the Cloud

Over the past few years, cloud computing and the growth of global large scale computing systems have led to applications which require data management across multiple datacenters. Initially key-value stores were proposed to provide single row level operations with eventual consistency. Although key-value stores provide high availability, they are not ideal for applications that require consistent data views. More recently, there has been a gradual shift to provide transactions with strong consistency to simplify application development. In this talk, we will start by analyzing the need and the revival of SQL database management systems in large cloud settings. We will discuss several state of the art systems, which provide transactional guarantees on collections of data items, thus supporting complex queries, while attempting to ensure scalability, elasticity and fault-tolerance. Of particular interest are applications which require geo-replicated data management. We will therefore discuss different approaches for replicating data in multi-datacenter environments. Throughout the talk, principles will be illustrated using concrete systems and protocols.