  Over the last couple of years, "Cloud Computing" or "Elastic Computing" has
emerged as a compelling and successful paradigm for internet scale computing.
One of the major contributing factors to this success is the elasticity of
resources. In spite of the elasticity provided by the infrastructure and the
scalable design of the applications, the elephant (or the underlying database),
which drives most of these web-based applications, is not very elastic and
scalable, and hence limits scalability. In this paper, we propose ElasTraS
which addresses this issue of scalability and elasticity of the data store in a
cloud computing environment to leverage from the elastic nature of the
underlying infrastructure, while providing scalable transactional data access.
This paper aims at providing the design of a system in progress, highlighting
the major design choices, analyzing the different guarantees provided by the
system, and identifying several important challenges for the research community
striving for computing in the cloud.
