Design and implementation of caching services in the cloud

Abstract

Data caching is a key paradigm for improving the performance of web services in terms of both end-user latency and database load. Such caching is becoming an essential component of any application or service designed for the cloud platform. In order to allow hosted applications to benefit from caching capabilities while avoiding dependence on explicit implementations and idiosyncrasies of internal caches, the caching services should be offered by a cloud provider as an integral part of its platform-as-a-service portfolio. We highlight various challenges associated with supporting cloud-based caching services, such as identifying the appropriate metering and service models, performance management, and resource sharing across cloud tenants. We also describe how these challenges were addressed by our prototype implementation, which is called Simple Cache for Cloud (SC2). We demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques by experimentally evaluating our prototype on a synthetic multitenant workload.