Composite as a Service: Cloud Application Structures, Provisioning, and Management
Christoph Fehling, Ralph Mietzner · it - Information Technology · 2011
Abstract Cloud computing and corresponding “as a service” models have transformed the way in which IT resources can be consumed. By taking advantage of the properties of the cloud — elasticity, pay-per-use and standardization — customers and providers alike can benefit from economies of scale, faster provisioning times and reduced costs. However, to fully exploit the potentials of the cloud, it is necessary, that applications, to be deployed on the cloud, support the inherent cloud properties. In this article we investigate how applications can be designed to comply with cloud infrastructures. We present a framework that allows modeling the variability within such applications regarding their structure, functional, and non-functional properties, as well as their deployment. Using these models the framework guides the user during the customization of an application, provisions it on available clouds, and enables common management functionality for cloud applications, such as elasticity, suspend, and resume.