SPANStore: cost-effective geo-replicated storage spanning multiple cloud services

By offering storage services in several geographically distributed data centers, cloud computing platforms enable applications to offer low latency access to user data. However, application developers are left to deal with the complexities associated with choosing the storage services at which any object is replicated and maintaining consistency across these replicas.

In this paper, we present SPANStore, a key-value store that exports a unified view of storage services in geographically distributed data centers. To minimize an application provider's cost, we combine three key principles. First, SPANStore spans multiple cloud providers to increase the geographical density of data centers and to minimize cost by exploiting pricing discrepancies across providers. Second, by estimating application workload at the right granularity, SPANStore judiciously trades off greater geo-distributed replication necessary to satisfy latency goals with the higher storage and data propagation costs this entails in order to satisfy fault tolerance and consistency requirements. Finally, SPANStore minimizes the use of compute resources to implement tasks such as two-phase locking and data propagation, which are necessary to offer a global view of the storage services that it builds upon. Our evaluation of SPANStore shows that it can lower costs by over 10x in several scenarios, in comparison with alternative solutions that either use a single storage provider or replicate every object to every data center from which it is accessed.