A Cloud-unaware Programming Model for Easy Development of Composite Services
Enric Tejedor, Jorge Ejarque, Francesc Lordan, Roger Rafanell, J. Álvarez Cid-Fuentes, Daniele Lezzi, Raül Sirvent, Rosa M. Badia · 2011
Cloud computing is inherently service-oriented: cloud applications are delivered to consumers as services via the Internet. Therefore, these applications can potentially benefit from the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles: they can be programmed as added-value services composed by pre-existing ones, thus favouring code reuse. However, new programming models are required to simplify their development, along with systems that are capable of orchestrating the execution of the resulting SaaS in the Cloud. In that regard, this paper presents Service Super scalar (Servicess), an alternative to existing PaaS which provides a programming model and execution runtime to ease the development and execution of service-based applications in clouds. Servicess is a task-based model: the user is only required to select the tasks, which can be services or regular methods, to be spawned asynchronously. The application, a composite service, is programmed in a totally sequential way and no API call must be included in the code. The runtime is in charge of automatically orchestrating the execution of the tasks in the Cloud, as well as of elastically deploying new virtual resources depending on the load. After describing the main characteristics of the programming model and the runtime, we evaluate the productivity of Servicess and show how it offers a good trade-off between programmability and runtime performance.