Towards elastic key-value stores on IaaS

Key-value stores such as Cassandra and HBase have gained popularity as for their scalability and high availability in the face of heavy workloads and hardware failure. Many enterprises are deploying applications backed by key-value stores on to resources leased from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers. However, current key-value stores are unable to take full advantage of the resource elasticity provided by IaaS providers due to several challenges: i) high performance of data access in virtualised environments; ii) load-rebalancing as the system scales up and down; and iii) the lack of autoscaling controllers. In this paper I present my research efforts on addressing these issues to provide an elastic key-value store deployed in IaaS environments.