PaaS Cloud Application and Database Portability: An Initial View

Abstract

A new paradigm to cater to the demand for increasingly complex software systems and to shape the way software applications are developed, has emerged, called Cloud Computing. Evolved from the already prevailing and established technologies such as web services, SOA (Service Oriented architecture), virtualization, grid, and cluster computing, Cloud computing proved it to realize the dream of transforming computing as a utility to the customers. Applications developed at Platform as a Service level (Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service being the other two levels) face vendor lock-in issue as the proprietary and non-standard APIs offered by providers results in a lack of interoperability and portability among cloud providers. This paper reports on an experiment done to assess the difficulties encountered while porting an application that uses various SQL and NoSQL data stores, message queue service and blob storage of Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web services and Google Cloud platform among each other. The heterogeneity of the incompatible proprietary interfaces makes the porting a non-trivial task. Various problems faced during the portability of the application are discussed and a middleware solution approach to these problems is proposed in this paper.