Deploying Database Appliances in the Cloud

Cloud computing is an increasingly popular paradigm for accessing computing resources. A popular class of computing clouds is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds, exemplified by Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). In these clouds, users are given access to virtual machines on which they can install and run arbitrary software, including database systems. Users can also deploy database appliances on these clouds, which are virtual machines with pre-installed pre-configured database systems. Deploying database appliances on IaaS clouds and performance tuning and optimization in this environment introduce some interesting research challenges. In this paper, we present some of these challenges, and we outline the tools and techniques required to address them. We present an end-to-end solution to one tuning problem in this environment, namely partitioning the CPU capacity of a physical machine among multiple database appliances running on this machine. We also outline possible future research directions in this area.