Cloud-native database systems at Alibaba

Cloud-native databases become increasingly important for the era of cloud computing, due to the needs for elasticity and on-demand usage by various applications. These challenges from cloud applications present new opportunities for cloud-native databases that cannot be fully addressed by traditional on-premise enterprise database systems. A cloud-native database leverages software-hardware co-design to explore accelerations offered by new hardware such as RDMA, NVM, kernel bypassing protocols such as DPDK. Meanwhile, new design architectures, such as shared storage, enable a cloud-native database to decouple computation from storage and provide excellent elasticity. For highly concurrent workloads that require horizontal scalability, a cloud-native database can leverage a shared-nothing layer to provide distributed query and transaction processing. Applications also require cloud-native databases to offer high availability through distributed consensus protocols. At Alibaba, we have explored a suite of technologies to design cloud-native database systems. Our storage engine, X-Engine and PolarFS, improves both write and read throughputs by using a LSM-tree design and self-adapted separation of hot and cold data records. Based on these efforts, we have designed and implemented POLARDB and its distributed version POLARDB-X, which has successfully supported the extreme transaction workloads during the 2018 Global Shopping Festival on November 11, 2018, and achieved commercial success on Alibaba Cloud. We have also designed an OLAP system called AnalyticDB (ADB in short) for enabling real-time interactive data analytics for big data. We have explored a self-driving database platform to achieve autoscaling and intelligent database management. We will report key technologies and lessons learned to highlight the technical challenges and opportunities for cloud-native database systems at Alibaba.