An Evaluation of Alternative Architectures for Transaction Processing in the Cloud

Donald Kossmann, Tim Kraska, Simon Loesing SIGMOD2010

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kraska/pub/sigmod10-cloudbench.pdf

Cloud computing promises a number of advantages for the deployment
of data-intensive applications. One important promise
is reduced cost with a pay-as-you-go business model. Another
promise is (virtually) unlimited throughput by adding servers if
the workload increases. This paper lists alternative architectures
to effect cloud computing for database applications and reports on
the results of a comprehensive evaluation of existing commercial
cloud services that have adopted these architectures. The focus of
this work is on transaction processing (i.e., read and update workloads),
rather than analytics or OLAP workloads, which have recently
gained a great deal of attention. The results are surprising
in several ways. Most importantly, it seems that all major vendors
have adopted a different architecture for their cloud services. As a
result, the cost and performance of the services vary significantly
depending on the workload.