Orestes: A scalable Database-as-a-Service architecture for low latency

Abstract

Today, the applicability of database systems in cloud environments is considerably restricted because of three major problems: I) high network latencies for remote/mobile clients, II) lack of elastic horizontal scalability mechanisms, and III) missing abstraction of storage and data models. In this paper, we propose an architecture, a REST/HTTP protocol and a set of algorithms to solve these problems through a Database-as-a-Service middleware called Orestes (Objects RESTfully Encapsulated in Standard Formats). Orestes exposes cloud-hosted NoSQL database systems through a scalable tier of REST servers. These provide database-independent, object-oriented schema design, a client-independent REST-API for database operations, globally distributed caching, cache consistency mechanisms and optimistic ACID transactions. By comparative evaluations we offer empirical evidence that the proposed Database-as-a-Service architecture indeed solves common latency, scalability and abstraction problems encountered in modern cloud-based applications.