Cloud Application Portability

The hype surrounding the Cloud has lead to a variety of vendors and offerings in the last years. They span the whole cloud stack from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) up to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Although many offerings already exist there still persist a number of problems and deficits. Especially the outsourcing of vast parts of the IT stack delivers cost savings for the customers. The vendors in turn can benefit from the economies of scale. A determining influence on the degree of IT commoditization is thereby the standardization of the products.The praised flexibility between different clouds is often impeded by non-portable vendor system configurations and restrictions which leads to unwanted lock-ins for the customers. In such a scenario the switch-over to a different provider leads to additional significant costs for necessary migrations. However, the business needs can change over time as can the price structure of the provider which makes it necessary to be as flexible as possible between different clouds.

Object of the project is to examine important aspects of portability in cloud environments and enhance the portability of cloud applications by applying common standards between heterogeneous clouds. We try to make use of a holistic view of the cloud including important aspects like cloud specific restrictions, platform configurations, the deployment and life cycle of cloud applications.

Paper:

Towards Application Portability in Platform as a Service

Application Migration Effort in the Cloud - The Case of Cloud Platforms

Application Migration Effort in the Cloud

Nucleus - Unified Deployment and Management for Platform as a Service

Unified Cloud Application Management

Data Governance and Semantic Recommendation Algorithms for Cloud Platform Selection

Deliverables:

Platform as as Service Provider Comparison

Participants:

Stefan Kolb
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Guido Wirtz