A Runtime Quality Measurement Framework for Cloud Database Service Systems

Cloud database services promise high performance, high availability, and elastic scalability. The system that provides cloud database services must, hence, be designed and managed in a way to achieve these high quality objectives. There are two technology trends that facilitate the design and management of cloud database service systems. First, the development of distributed replicated database software that is optimally designed for highly available and scalable Web applications and offered as open source software. Second, the possibility to deploy the system on cloud computing infrastructure to facilitate availability and scalability via on-demand provisioning of geo-located servers. We argue that a runtime quality measurement and analysis framework is necessary for the successful runtime management of cloud database service systems. Our framework offers three contributions over the state of the art: (i) the analysis of scaling strategies, (ii) the analysis of conflicts between contradictory objectives, and (iii) the analysis of system configuration changes on runtime performance and availability.