In the new EU project ACTiCLOUD, MonetDB Solutions is to develop technologies to push her open-source analytical database system MonetDB towards a DataBase-as-a-Service in the cloud. The new features will focus on efficient and flexible provisioning and use of (virtual) hardware resources in the cloud. The first releases of the new features are expected in 2018.
Despite their proliferation as a dominant computing paradigm, cloud computing systems lack effective mechanisms to manage their vast amounts of resources efficiently, leading to severe resource waste and ultimately limiting their applicability to large classes of critical applications that pose non-moderate resource demands. This creates a significant need to lift existing technological barriers of actual fluidity and scalability of cloud resources towards promoting cloud computing as a critical cornerstone for digital economy.
ACTiCLOUD proposes a novel cloud computing architecture for drastically improved management of cloud resources, targeting both resource efficiency and scalability. By utilizing modest investments on hardware intelligence that enables true resource disaggregation between multiple servers, ACTiCLOUD progresses current state-of-the-art in hypervisors and cloud management systems, promoting holistic resource management both at the rack scale and across distributed cloud sites.
On top of this, ACTiCLOUD will evolve the ecosystem around in-memory databases, a core component for extremely demanding and critical classes of applications that up to now have faced severe difficulties in matching their resource requirements to state-of-the-art cloud offerings, with a final goal to provide cost-efficient and highly performant DataBase-as-a-Service (DBaaS) cloud platforms. To this end, ACTiCLOUD optimizes system software and managed runtime systems that are heavily utilized by databases and Big Data management frameworks and evolves two cutting-edge representatives of database frameworks, MonetDB and Neo4j.