Component migration in a trans-cloud environment

Abstract

The trans-cloud approach has recently been proposed to simplify the development and operation of cloud applications, and to minimize the lock-in problem. The three key ingredients of the trans-cloud approach are: agnostic topology descriptions, a unified API, and mechanisms for the independent specification of providers’ services. We build on the trans-cloud mechanisms to propose a solution for the migration of stateless cloud components at runtime. In the context of our trans-cloud tool, we propose an algorithm for the migration of cloud applications’ components between different providers, possibly changing their service levels between IaaS and PaaS. We present an implementation of our proposed solution, and illustrate it with a case study and experimental results.