Using SLA to guide database transition to NoSQL on the cloud: A systematic mapping study

Cloud computing became a reality, and many companies are now moving their data-centers to the cloud. A concept that is often linked with cloud computing is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): the computational infrastructure of a company can now be seen as a monthly cost instead of a number of different factors. Recently, a large number of organizations started to replace their relational databases with hybrid solutions (NoSQL DBs, Search Engines, ORDBs). These changes are motivated by (i) performance improvements on the overall performance of the applications and (ii) inability to a RDBMS to provide the same performance of a hybrid solution given a fixed monthly infrastructure cost. However, not always the companies can exactly measure beforehand the future impact on the performance on their services by making this sort of technological changes (replace RDBMS by another solution). The goal of this systematic mapping study is to investigate the use of Service-Level-Agreements (SLAs) on database-transitioning scenarios and to verify how SLAs can be used in this processes.