Cloud service portability opportunities

Abstract

Several open research questions motivated us to conduct this research: How to wisely choose a cloud host for services and how to change the cloud provider in an easy manner. Service portability in the cloud is the ability to move the services from one to another provider in a simpler manner. It is still an open research area which deserves more attention. This paper gives an overview of the current opportunities in the area of cloud service portability, while giving special attention to TOSCA’s approach. Our research is based on an adapter model to achieve the cloud portability. It describes the foundation of a framework which will allow the services to be described with the usage of XML. The solution is to build a custom platform (PaaS) capable of accepting installations of any portable application. The application provider will have to describe: 1) the installation requirements and application structure in separate XML files and 2) the platform to perform the necessary installation according to the XML files, and 3) to automatically deploy the application/services.