Automatic software deployment in the azure cloud

Abstract

For application providers, cloud computing has the advantage that it reduces the administrative effort required to satisfy processing and storage requirements. However, to simplify the task of building scalable applications, some of the cloud computing platforms impose constraints on the application architecture, its implementation and tools that may be used in development; Microsoft Azure is no exception. In this paper we show how an existing drug discovery system - Discovery Bus - can benefit from Azure even though none of its components was built in the .Net framework. Using an approach based on the "Deployment and Configuration of Component-based Applications Specfication" (D&C), we were able to assemble and deploy jobs that include different types of process-based tasks. We show how extending D&C deployment models with temporal and spatial constraints provided the flexibility needed to move all the compute-intensive tasks within the Discovery Bus to Azure with no changes to their original code. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.