Transparent Access to Relational Databases in the Cloud using a Multi-tenant ESB

In the last years Cloud computing has become popular among IT organizations aiming to reduce their operational costs. Applications can be designed to run in the Cloud, or can be partially or completely migrated to it. Migrating the data layer of an application to the Cloud, however, implies that existing applications might need to be adapted in order to access their migrated to the Cloud databases. In this work we examine how we can use an existing ESB to enable transparent access to the relational data store running either in the Cloud or on-premise. The goal of our approach is to minimize the effort required to adapt the application. In particular, we discuss the requirements and prototype realization of a Cloud aware data access layer for transparent data access, using an existing open source and multi-tenant aware ESB as the basis. We then evaluate the performance of our proposed solution by considering different Cloud providers and using example data from an existing benchmark as application workload.