DB-Risk: The Game of Global Database Placement

Geo-replication is the process of maintaining copies of data at geographically dispersed datacenters for better availability and fault-tolerance. The distinguishing characteristic of geo-replication is the large wide-area latency between datacenters that varies widely depending on the location of the datacenters. Thus, choosing which datacenters to deploy a cloud application has a direct impact on the observable response time. We propose an optimization framework that automatically derives a geo-replication placement plan with the objective of minimizing latency. By running the optimization framework on real placement scenarios, we learn a set of placement optimizations for geo-replication. Some of these optimizations are surprising while others are in retrospect straight-forward. In this demonstration, we highlight the geo-replication placement optimizations through the DB-Risk game. DB-Risk invites players to create different placement scenarios while experimenting with the proposed optimizations. The placements created by the players are tested on real cloud deployments.