Efficient Transaction Processing for Short-Lived Transactions in the Cloud

The cloud, in the past few years, has become the preferred platform for hosting web applications. Many of these web applications store their data in a distributed cloud storage system, which greatly simplifies application development and provides increased availability and reliability. However, with increasing user demand for web applications, these cloud storage systems often become the performance bottleneck. To address the cloud's performance demands, many storage system features, such as strong consistency and transactional support, are often omitted in favour of performance. Nonetheless, transactions remain necessary to ensure data integrity and application correctness. In this thesis, we introduce CrossStitch, which is an efficient transaction processing framework for distributed key-value storage systems. CrossStitch supports general transactions, where transactions include both computation and key accesses. It is specifically optimized for short-lived transactions that are typical of cloud-deployed web applications. In CrossStitch, a transaction is partitioned into a series of components that form a transaction chain. These components are executed and the transaction is propagated along the storage servers instead of being executed on the application server. This chained structure, in which servers only communicate with their immediate neighbours, enables CrossStitch to implement a pipelined version of two-phase commit to ensure transactional atomicity. CrossStitch is able to eliminate a significant amount of setup overhead using this structure by executing the transaction and the atomic commit protocol concurrently. Therefore, CrossStitch provides low latency and efficient transactional support for cloud storage systems. Our evaluation demonstrates that CrossStitch is a scalable and efficient transaction processing framework for web transactions.