The CloudMIG Approach: Model-Based Migration of Software Systems to Cloud-Optimized Applications
Sören Frey, Wilhelm Hasselbring · 2011
Cloud computing provides means for reducing over- and under-provisioning through enabling a highly flexible resource allocation. Running an existing software system on a computing basis can involve extensive reengineering activities during the migration. To reduce the correspondent effort, it is often possible to deploy an existing system widely unmodified in IaaS VM instances. However, this simplistic migration approach does not solve the challenge of over- and under-provisioning or scalability issues per se, as our experiments using Eucalyptus and the popular open source system Apache OFBiz show. Moreover, current migration approaches suffer from several further shortcomings. For example, they are often limited to specific environments or do not provide automated support for the alignment with a environment. We present our model-based approach CloudMIG which addresses these shortcomings. It aims at supporting SaaS providers to semi-automatically migrate existing enterprise software systems to scalable and resource-efficient PaaS and IaaS-based applications. To facilitate reasoning about the suitability of certain environments for a given system and the degree of alignment during the reengineering process, we introduce the Cloud Suitability and Alignment (CSA) hierarchy. For example, Apache OFBiz used in our experiments is initially categorized “cloud compatible” but not cloud optimized as it does not exploit the cloud's advantages.