Cloud Data Services: Workloads, Architectures and Multi-Tenancy

Enterprises are moving their business critical workloads to public clouds at an accelerating pace. Cloud data services for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), Data Analytics and NoSQL are essential building blocks for enterprise applications. Multi-tenancy is a crucial tenet for cloud data service providers that allows sharing of data center resources across tenants, thereby reducing cost. In this article we review architectures of today’s cloud data services and identify trends and challenges that arise in multi-tenant cloud data services. We survey techniques that have been developed for enabling elasticity, providing SLAs, ensuring performance isolation and reducing cost. We review the emerging paradigm of serverless databases and point out opportunities and challenges. We identify open research problems in the fast-changing landscape of cloud data services.