10. Conclusions

The advantages of the cloud computing paradigm opens up new avenues for deploying novel applications which were not economically feasible in a traditional enterprise infrastructure setting. Therefore, the cloud has become an increasingly popular platform for hosting software applications in a variety of domains such as e-retail, finance, news and social networking. Thus, we are witnessing a proliferation in the number of applications with a tremendous increase in the scale of the data generated as well as being consumed by such applications. Cloud-hosted database systems powering these applications form a critical component in the software stack of these applications. They play an important role in ensuring the smooth deployment or migration of software applications from the traditional enterprise infrastructures and on-premise data centers to the new cloud platforms and infrastructures. In the previous chapter, we presented an overview of the state-of-the-art of existing technologies for hosting the database tier of software applications in cloud environments. We crystallized the design choices, strengths, weaknesses of each technology. In this chapter, we shed the lights on a set of research challenges, that have been introduced by the new wave of cloud-hosted data storage systems that need to be addressed in order to ensure that the vision of designing and implementing successful scalable data management solutions can be achieved.