Policy-Driven Data Management Middleware for Multi-cloud Storage in Multi-tenant SaaS

Ansar Rafique, Dimitri Van Landuyt, Bert Lagaisse, Wouter Joosen
2015 2015 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Symposium on Big Data Computing (BDC)  
Multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications are increasingly built on combinations of cloud storage technologies and providers in a so-called multi-cloud setup. One advantage is that such a setup helps satisfying the different -sometimes even contrasting-storage requirements of different customer organizations (tenants). In such a multi-cloud environment, the application data is distributed and replicated over multiple cloud storage systems, each differing profoundly in supported
more » ... models, development APIs, performance, scalability, availability, and durability. Despite the clear benefits, managing such a multi-cloud storage architecture in practice is non-trivial. Addressing this complexity in the application layer is far from ideal, as it inherently limits the flexibility with which continuously changing application-wide and tenant-specific storage requirements can be met. To alleviate this, we present a reusable data management middleware that (i) makes abstraction of multiple cloud storage technologies and thus also providers; (ii) follows a policy-driven approach for making data placement decisions; and (iii) provides tenant customization support, i.e. by allowing tenants to define storage configurations and data storage policies. We validate and evaluate our prototype implementation in the context of a realistic multi-cloud SaaS application. Our performance benchmark results indicate that the benefits of the proposed middleware can be achieved with acceptable overhead. Index Terms-Data management middleware, Multi-cloud storage, Policy-driven, Abstraction API for NoSQL, Multi-tenant SaaS 2015 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Symposium on Big Data Computing 78 2015 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Symposium on Big Data Computing 978-0-7695-5696-3/15 $31.00
doi:10.1109/bdc.2015.39 dblp:conf/bdc/RafiqueLLJ15 fatcat:tckpbhbtgzafbllug7urehduga