Transactional Cloud Applications: Status Quo, Challenges, and Opportunities

Other (2025)
Author(s)

R.N. Laigner (University of Copenhagen)

G.C. Christodoulou (TU Delft - Data-Intensive Systems)

K. Psarakis (TU Delft - Data-Intensive Systems)

A. Katsifodimos (TU Delft - Data-Intensive Systems)

Yongluan Zhou (University of Copenhagen)

Research Group
Data-Intensive Systems
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1145/3722212.3725635
More Info
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Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Research Group
Data-Intensive Systems
Pages (from-to)
829-836
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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.