Optimal distribution of applications in the cloud

Abstract

The emergence of the cloud computing paradigm introduces a number of challenges and opportunities to application and system developers. The multiplication and proliferation of available offerings by cloud service providers, for example, makes the selection of an appropriate solution complex and inefficient. On the other hand, this availability of offerings creates additional possibilities in the way that applications can be engineered or re-engineered to take advantage of e.g. the elastic nature, or the pay per use model of cloud computing. This work proposes a formal framework which allows to explore the possibility space of optimally distributing application components across cloud offerings in an efficient and flexible manner. The proposed approach introduces a set of innovative in their use concepts and demonstrates how this framework can be used in practice by means of a running scenario. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.