Developing stateful cloud applications, such as low-latency workflows and microservices with strict consistency requirements, remains arduous for programmers. The Stateful Functions-as-a-Service (SFaaS) paradigm aims to serve these use cases. However, existing approaches provide weak transactional guarantees or perform expensive external state accesses requiring inefficient transactional protocols that increase execution latency. In this paper, we present Styx, a novel dataflow-based SFaaS runtime that executes serializable transactions consisting of stateful functions that form arbitrary call-graphs with exactly-once guarantees. Styx extends a deterministic transactional protocol by contributing: i) a function acknowledgment scheme to determine transaction boundaries required in SFaaS workloads, ii) a function-execution caching mechanism, and iii) an early commit-reply mechanism that substantially reduces transaction execution latency. Experiments with the YCSB, TPC-C, and Deathstar benchmarks show that Styx outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by achieving at least one order of magnitude higher throughput while exhibiting near-linear scalability and low latency. ... Read more

Developing and deploying transactional cloud applications such as banking and e-commerce systems is a daunting task for developers. The reason for this difficulty is twofold. First, developing such applications shifts the developers’ focus from the application logic to considerations of distributed transactions, fault-tolerance, consistency, and scalability. Second, deploying such applications involves multiple systems, such as databases, load balancers, or containerized services, impeding efficient resource management. This demonstration presents Styx, a scalable application runtime that allows developers to build scalable and transactional cloud applications with minimal effort. It supports serializability and exactly-once guarantees and focuses on the ease of development and deployment, as well as Styx’s fault-tolerance mechanisms. ... Read more

While the concept of large-scale stream processing is very popular nowadays, efficient dynamic allocation of resources is still an open issue in the area. The database research community has yet to evaluate different autoscaling techniques for stream processing engines under a robust benchmarking setting and evaluation framework. As a result, no conclusions can be made about the current solutions and problems that remain unsolved. Therefore, we address this issue with a principled evaluation approach.

This paper evaluates the state-of-the-art control-based solutions in the autoscaling area with diverse, dynamic workloads, applying specific metrics. We investigate different aspects of the autoscaling problem as performance and convergence. Our experiments reveal that current control-based autoscaling techniques fail to account for generated lag cost by rescaling or underprovisioning and cannot efficiently handle practical scenarios of intensely dynamic workloads. Unexpectedly, we discovered that an autoscaling method not tailored for streaming can outperform others in certain scenarios. ... Read more

Data processing has heavily evolved in the last two decades, from single-node processing to distributed processing and from the MapReduce paradigm to the stream processing paradigm. At the same time, cloud computing has emerged as the primary means of deploying and operating a data processing system. In the cloud era, flexible resource allocation combined with flexible pricing schemes have brought forward new opportunities and have democratized access to computing resources. However, streaming dataflow or stream processing engines were originally designed for in-house clusters of fixed resources with limited needs for adaptivity. Therefore, they lack the mechanisms to adapt to unexpected changes in the needs of the processing workload. When solutions have been proposed in the literature, their experimental evaluation is limited hindering the progress of the field. The same applies to the native fault tolerance mechanisms that virtually every stream processing engine employs. In this thesis, we study the problem of adaptivity for streaming dataflow engines, and we focus on three major adaptivity subproblems: adaptivity to 𝑖) statistical changes, 𝑖𝑖) infrastructure failures, and 𝑖𝑖𝑖) input rate changes.
In Chapter 2, we study adaptivity to statistical changes through the important task of streaming similarity joins that is heavily affected by imbalanced loads, a by-product of statistical changes. We propose S3J ; the first adaptive distributed streaming similarity joins method in the general metric space that employs a two-layered adaptive partitioning scheme to reduce unnecessary similarity computations and distribute the load to the available workers. Our partitioning scheme is paired with an efficient load balancing scheme that leverages the existing partitioning in order to rebalance any imbalanced load. Our results show that S3J outperforms the employed baseline, inspired by a MapReduce method, in terms of partitioning efficiency. Additionally, our experiments show that the load balancing scheme can gradually defuse the imbalanced load and involve all the available workers in the processing.
The majority of the stream processing engines employ a checkpoint-based fault tolerance mechanism. In Chapter 3, we look at the adaptivity to infrastructure failures through the existing checkpointing protocols. We propose CheckMate, a principled experimental framework for evaluating checkpointing protocols for streaming dataflows. First, we summarize all the essential preliminaries required to study checkpoint-based fault tolerance. Then, we discuss in detail, implement, and evaluate in different scenarios the three main checkpointing protocols. Our evaluation shows that when the load is uniformly distributed, the implemented by most stream processing engines coordinated checkpointing protocol outperforms the alternatives. However, the uncoordinated prevails in the presence of skew, while it shows no domino effect when cyclic queries are employed.
Finally, in Chapter 4, we address the problem of adaptivity to input rate changes. Although multiple solutions have been proposed, their experimental evaluation is shallow and does not include detailed comparisons with other solutions. We propose a principled evaluation framework for stream processing autoscalers. We establish important metrics, queries, and workloads in order to provide guidelines for the evaluation of autoscaling solutions for stream processing. We discuss the state-of-the-art control-based autoscalers, and we evaluate them using the proposed framework. Our results show that, for complex queries, none of the evaluated autoscalers can adapt efficiently, while for simple stateless queries, a simple generic autoscaler outperforms the solutions tailored to stream processing.
We conclude this thesis by summarizing our main findings and discussing the limitations of our work. Based on the valuable insights we gained while designing and implementing the research work included in this thesis, we propose a series of interesting and important future research directions that are not limited to adaptivity problems but address stream processing in general. ... Read more

Stream processing in the last decade has seen broad adoption in both commercial and research settings. One key element for this success is the ability of modern stream processors to handle failures while ensuring exactly-once processing guarantees. At the moment of writing, virtually all stream processors that guarantee exactly-once processing implement a variant of Apache Flink's coordinated checkpoints - an extension of the original Chandy-Lamport checkpoints from 1985. However, the reasons behind this prevalence of the coordinated approach remain anecdotal, as reported by practitioners of the stream processing community. At the same time, common checkpointing approaches, such as the uncoordinated and the communication-induced ones, remain largely unexplored. This paper is the first to address this gap by i) shedding light on why practitioners have favored the coordinated approach and ii) investigating whether there are viable alternatives. To this end, we implement three checkpointing approaches that we surveyed and adapted for the distinct needs of streaming dataflows. Our analysis shows that the coordinated approach outperforms the uncoordinated and communication-induced protocols under uniformly distributed workloads. To our surprise, however, the uncoordinated approach is not only competitive to the coordinated one in uniformly distributed workloads, but it also outperforms the coordinated approach in skewed workloads. We conclude that rather than blindly employing coordinated checkpointing, research should focus on optimizing the very promising uncoordinated approach, as it can address issues with skew and support prevalent cyclic queries. We believe that our findings can trigger further research into checkpointing mechanisms. ... Read more

How can we perform similarity joins of multi-dimensional streams in a distributed fashion, achieving low latency? Can we adaptively repartition those streams in order to retain high performance under concept drifts? Current approaches to similarity joins are either restricted to single-node deployments or focus on set-similarity joins, failing to cover the ubiquitous case of metric-space similarity joins. In this paper, we propose the first adaptive distributed streaming similarity join approach that gracefully scales with variable velocity and distribution of multi-dimensional data streams. Our approach can adaptively rebalance the load of nodes in the case of concept drifts, allowing for similarity computations in the general metric space. We implement our approach on top of Apache Flink and evaluate its data partitioning and load balancing schemes on a set of synthetic datasets in terms of latency, comparisons ratio, and data duplication ratio ... Read more

In this work, we evaluate autoscaling solutions for stream processing engines. Although autoscaling has become a mainstream subject of research in the last decade, the database research community has yet to evaluate different autoscaling techniques under a proper benchmarking setting and evaluation framework. As a result, every newly proposed autoscaling solution only performs a shallow performance evaluation and comparison against existing solutions. In this paper, we evaluate autoscaling solutions by employing two streaming queries and a dynamic workload that follows a cosinus pattern. Our experiments reveal that current autoscaling techniques fail to account for generated lag due to rescaling or underprovisioning and cannot efficiently handle practical scenarios of intensely dynamic workloads. ... Read more

Data Integration has been a long-standing and challenging problem for enterprises and researchers. Data residing in multiple heterogeneous sources must be integrated and prepared such that the valuable information that it carries, can be extracted and analysed. However, the volume and the velocity of the produced data in addition to the modern business needs for real-time results have pushed data analytics, and therefore data integration, towards data streams. While data integration is a hard problem in and of itself, integrating data streams becomes even more challenging. Streams are characterized by their high velocity, infinite nature and predisposition to concept drift.

The goal of this doctoral work is to design and provide scalable methods to support data integration tasks on massive data streams, i.e., support streaming data integration. The aim of this work is threefold. First, we aim at developing and proposing streaming methods to compute temporal stream data-profiles and summaries that can describe the dynamic state of a stream in the course of time. Second, we aim at developing methods and metrics of stream similarity. Those methods and metrics can serve as means to detect similar or complementary streams in a streaming data lake. Finally, we aim at optimizing distributed streaming similarity joins - a very important operation that precedes entity linking and resolution. This paper discusses exciting challenges and open problems in the field, and a research plan on tackling them. ... Read more

Capturing relationships among heterogeneous datasets in large data lakes - traditionally termed schema matching - is one of the most challenging problems that corporations and institutions face nowadays. Discovering and integrating datasets heavily relies on the effectiveness of the schema matching methods in use. However, despite the wealth of research, evaluation of schema matching methods is still a daunting task: there is a lack of openly-available datasets with ground truth, reference method implementations, and comprehensible GUIs that would facilitate development of both novel state-of-the-art schema matching techniques and novel data discovery methods.Our recently proposed Valentine is the first system to offer an open-source experiment suite to organize, execute and orchestrate large-scale matching experiments. In this demonstration we present its functionalities and enhancements: i) a scalable system, with a user-centric GUI, that enables the fabrication of datasets and the evaluation of matching methods on schema matching scenarios tailored to the scope of tabular dataset discovery, ii) a scalable holistic matching system that can receive tabular datasets from heterogeneous sources and provide with similarity scores among their columns, in order to facilitate modern procedures in data lakes, such as dataset discovery. ... Read more

Data scientists today search large data lakes to discover and integrate datasets. In order to bring together disparate data sources, dataset discovery methods rely on some form of schema matching: the process of establishing correspondences between datasets. Traditionally, schema matching has been used to find matching pairs of columns between a source and a target schema. However, the use of schema matching in dataset discovery methods differs from its original use. Nowadays schema matching serves as a building block for indicating and ranking inter-dataset relationships. Surprisingly, although a discovery method’s success relies highly on the quality of the underlying matching algorithms, the latest discovery methods employ existing schema matching algorithms in an ad-hoc fashion due to the lack of openly-available datasets with ground truth, reference method implementations, and evaluation metrics. In this paper, we aim to rectify the problem of evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of schema matching methods for the specific needs of dataset discovery. To this end, we propose Valentine, an extensible open-source experiment suite to execute and organize large-scale automated matching experiments on tabular data. Valentine includes implementations of seminal schema matching methods that we either implemented from scratch (due to absence of open source code) or imported from open repositories. The contributions of Valentine are: i) the definition of four schema matching scenarios as encountered in dataset discovery methods, ii) a principled dataset fabrication process tailored to the scope of dataset discovery methods and iii) the most comprehensive evaluation of schema matching techniques to date, offering insight on the strengths and weaknesses of existing techniques, that can serve as a guide for employing schema matching in future dataset discovery methods. ... Read more