A Contract-Aware and Cost-effective LSM Store for Cloud Storage with Low Latency Spikes

Cloud storage is gaining popularity because features such as pay-as-you-go significantly reduce storage costs. However, the community has not sufficiently explored its contract model and latency characteristics. As LSM-Tree-based key-value stores (LSM stores) become the building block for numerous cloud applications, how cloud storage would impact the performance of key-value accesses is vital. This study reveals the significant latency variances of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) under various I/O pressures, which challenges LSM store read performance on cloud storage. To reduce the corresponding tail latency, we propose Calcspar, a contract-aware LSM store for cloud storage, which efficiently addresses the challenges by regulating the rate of I/O requests to cloud storage and absorbing surplus I/O requests with the data cache. We specifically developed a fluctuation-aware cache to lower the high latency brought on by workload fluctuations. Additionally, we build a congestion-aware IOPS allocator to reduce the impact of LSM store internal operations on read latency. We evaluated Calcspar on EBS with different real-world workloads and compared it to the cutting-edge LSM stores. The results show that Calcspar can significantly reduce tail latency while maintaining regular read and write performance, keeping the 99^th percentile latency under 550μs and reducing average latency by 66%. In addition, Calcspar has lower write prices and average latency compared to Cloud NoSQL services offered by cloud vendors.