Elton: A Cloud Resource Scaling-Out Manager for NoSQL Databases

We present the Elton tool, a publicly available cloud resource elasticity management system tailored to NoSQL databases. Elton is integrated in the Ganetimgr web platform, and offers an easy to use web interface, through which monitoring and horizontal scaling of NoSQL databases can be performed and what-if analysis queries are enabled. Elton uses Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) as the underlying modeling framework, and encapsulates state-of-the-art horizontal scaling policies that offer different trade-offs between performance and monetary deployment cost. Its main novelty is that it employs probabilistic model checking to allow for both efficient elasticity decisions and analysis of scaling actions and serves as a case study about the benefits of model checking in online decision making and analysis.