Cloudy Master Thesis Topics

Cloud computing has changed the view on data management by focusing primarily on cost, flexibility and availability instead of consistency and performance at any price as traditional DBMS do. As a result, cloud data storages run on commodity hardware, are designed to be scalable, easy to maintain and highly fault-tolerant often providing relaxed consistency guarantees. The success of key-value stores like Amazon's S3 or the variety of open-source systems reflect this shift. Existing solutions, however, still lack substantial functionality provided by a traditional DBMS (e.g., support for transactions and a declarative query language) and are tailored to specific scenarios creating a jungle of services. That is, users have to decide for a specific service and are later locked into this service, preventing the evolution of the application, leading to misuse of services and expensive migrations to other services. With Cloudy we have started to build our own highly scalable database, which provides a completely modularized architecture and is not tailored to a specific use case. For example, Cloudy supports stream processing, as well as SQL and simple key-value requests.

Related to Cloudy we offer several Master thesis topics. If you are interested, please contact Tim Kraska or Simon Loesing. Possible thesis topics include:

An Economic Model for the Cloud

The goal of the master thesis is to develop an economic model to balance the different, often conflicting and time-varying workload requirements for a cloud database. For example, the model should automatically optimize the number of data nodes, the data placement and the access path for the running workloads to guarantee the service level agreements but also decide when it is more cost efficient to violate them. To achieve this challenging goal, the first part of the thesis will be concerned with building a simulation environment to allow testing different strategies. The goal of the second part of the thesis is then to develop a first initial model to balance the different requirements in the cloud.

Optimizing SQL in the Cloud

The goal of this master thesis is to improve the performance of SQL in Cloudy. Possible techniques include the optimization of the messaging framework, consistency protocol, indexing, predicate push-down, storage layer optimization etc. The scope and focus of the thesis will be discussed in the beginning. The outcome of this thesis will be part of the open-source release of Cloudy.

Transaction Processing in the Cloud

Cloudy already supports different levels of consistency but no transactions. The focus of this thesis is to implement transaction support with different consistency guarantees (e.g., ACID, snapshot isolation or read committed) in Cloudy. The particular challenge of this thesis is to implement (and possibly develop new) protocols that keep the overhead as small as possible to still allow for reasonable performance even in larger deployments.