Towards elastic component-based cloud applications

Abstract

In the context of cloud computing, elasticity refers to the capability of an application to automatically adapt its resource consumption to the current demand, i.e. scale out or scale in as the load increases or decreases. Today’s platform-as-aservice (PaaS) cloud solutions are strongly biased towards typical client/server,webbased applications. The provided runtime environments and services are thus only of limited help for building traditional business applications. In this paper, a vision of elastic component-based applications is presented that is aimed at supporting elasticity for arbitrary application designs. This vision is supported by a component-based programming model for allowing developers to specify application functionality in a cloud-enabled way and a runtime environment that supports the specification and automatic management of non-functional attributes, such as application response times. For both areas, the programming model as well as the management of nonfunctional attributes, the paper presents the challenges, an approach for realizing the ultimate vision, as well as our initial results.