CumuloNimbo is a European project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Programme Framework (FP7) that targets to obtain a highly scalable transactional platform as a service (PaaS). One of they innovations will be attaining scalability without trading off consistency as it is the norm in today's PaaS. One of the main challenges associated with cloud technologies and the next generation of Platforms as a Service (PaaS) is the question of how to provide ease of programming, consistency and scalability at the same time. What is needed is a next generation execution platform that can be installed like a service (Platform as a Service or PaaS) that consists of modular and stackable software components that are as easy to program and provide the same consistency levels as current service oriented platforms, and that at the same time is able to provide Internet-scale services (100s of nodes providing service to millions of clients). Current PaaS initiatives sacrifice data consistency for the sake of scalability. Thus, data consistency becomes responsibility of the application developers. This requires hiring highly skilled application developers able to build applications on top of PaaS with weak consistency guarantees what is often not feasible for SMEs. As a result, many applications lose their data coherence resulting and in poor quality of service which quickly becomes visible to end users, which is costly in terms of the image users perceive of the service and PaaS provider CumuloNimbo aims at developing a radically new Platform as a Service that will provide high scalability (100+ service nodes) without sacrificing data consistency and ease of programming. The targeted PaaS will be a multi-tier software stack for cloud computing providing the same functionality to current, software multi-tier stacks, such as Java EE, SAP Netweaver or .NET. Providing scalability without trading off consistency is a major breakthrough that will enable European stakeholders in service platforms, such as SAP, to position in the cloud computing market with a competitive advantage. The CumuloNimbo PaaS will compete with the most recent developments in the PaaS arena that scale at the cost of weakening data consistency and/or constraining the programming model of applications.

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The goal of project ReD is to achieve a generic, robust, and inexpensive shared-storage cluster from an off-the-shelf RDBMS. In detail, the project will deliver the following concrete results:

• A general architecture and specification of the proposed approach.
• An exploration of the performance, scalability, and dependability aspects of the approach, highlighting the most interesting tradeoffs.
• A detailed experimental evaluation, using the prototype and industry standard transaction processing benchmarks.

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