Transactional Cloud Applications: Status Quo, Challenges, and Opportunities
Rodrigo Laigner, George Christodoulou, Kyriakos Psarakis, Asterios Katsifodimos, Yongluan Zhou
TL;DR
This paper surveys the landscape of transactional cloud applications, arguing that the migration to cloud-native architectures reintroduces data-management challenges around state, durability, and distributed consistency. It proposes a taxonomy centered on programming models, state management, and application lifecycle to organize the diverse cloud runtimes (microservices, actors, FaaS, and dataflows) and to compare their trade-offs. The authors outline open problems in programming models, state and messaging, and benchmarks, calling for formal semantics, better cross-model interoperability, and realistic evaluation frameworks to advance the data-management community's role in cloud application design. The work aims to guide researchers and practitioners toward principled, scalable, and maintainable cloud transactional systems with improved fault tolerance and consistency guarantees.
Abstract
Transactional cloud applications such as payment, booking, reservation systems, and complex business workflows are currently being rewritten for deployment in the cloud. This migration to the cloud is happening mainly for reasons of cost and scalability. Over the years, application developers have used different migration approaches, such as microservice frameworks, actors, and stateful dataflow systems. The migration to the cloud has brought back data management challenges traditionally handled by database management systems. Those challenges include ensuring state consistency, maintaining durability, and managing the application lifecycle. At the same time, the shift to a distributed computing infrastructure introduced new issues, such as message delivery, task scheduling, containerization, and (auto)scaling. Although the data management community has made progress in developing analytical and transactional database systems, transactional cloud applications have received little attention in database research. This tutorial aims to highlight recent trends in the area and discusses open research challenges for the data management community.