Traditional monolithic applications are migrated to the cloud, typically using a microservice-like architecture. Although this migration leads to significant benefits such as scalability and development agility, it also leaves behind the transactional guarantees that database systems have provided to monolithic applications for decades. In the cloud era, developers build transactional and fault-tolerant distributed applications by explicitly programming transaction protocols at the application level.
In this paper, we argue that the principles behind the streaming dataflow execution model and deterministic transactional protocols provide a powerful and suitable substrate for executing transactional cloud applications. To this end, we introduce Styx, a transactional application runtime based on streaming dataflows that enables an object-oriented programming model for scalable, faulttolerant cloud applications with serializable guarantees.

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.

A wide range of applications manage interval data. HINT was recently proposed to hierarchically index intervals in main memory. The index outperforms competitive structures by a wide margin, but under its current setup, HINT is able to service only single query requests. In practice however, real systems receive a large number of queries at the same time and so, our focus in this paper is on batch query processing. We propose two novel evaluation strategies termed level-based and partition-based, which both work in a per-level fashion, i.e., all queries for an index level are computed before moving to the next level. The new strategies operate in a cache-aware fashion to reduce the cache misses caused by climbing the index hierarchy or accessing multiple partitions per level, and to decrease the total execution time for a query batch. Our experimental analysis with both real and synthetic datasets showed that our batch processing strategies always outperform a baseline that executes queries in a serial fashion, and that partition-based is overall the most efficient strategy.