Towards Transaction as a Service

Abstract: This paper argues for decoupling transaction processing from existing two-layer cloud-native databases and making transaction processing as an independent service. By building a transaction as a service (TaaS) layer, the transaction processing can be independently scaled for high resource utilization and can be independently upgraded for development agility. Accordingly, we architect an execution-transaction-storage three-layer cloud-native database. By connecting to TaaS, 1) the AP engines can be empowered with ACID TP capability, 2) multiple standalone TP engine instances can be incorporated to support multi-master distributed TP for horizontal scalability, 3) multiple execution engines with different data models can be integrated to support multi-model transactions, and 4) high performance TP is achieved through extensive TaaS optimizations and consistent evolution. Cloud-native databases deserve better architecture: we believe that TaaS provides a path forward to better cloud-native databases.