Automated architecture for portability in pass using virtual appliance

Abstract

Over the past decade, with Cloud Computing, IT industry is advancing towards an era where resources are delivered as a service rather than a product. Cloud Computing provides applications, platforms, and resources delivered as a service over the internet with pay-as-use model. Cloud Computing is popular because it promises a return-on-investment, better scalability, dynamic provisioning, transparency, reduced capital cost, and zero maintenance and operational cost. Cloud Computing can be very beneficial for small-scale and mid-scale organizations because they can lease computer infrastructure at economical rates which reduces capital cost. With the adoption of Cloud Computing by reputed organizations, it diverges into many standards and models which results in heterogeneity in the Cloud Environment. Heterogeneity between Cloud providers causes many problems like vendor lock-in, portability and interoperability, preventing future adoption of Cloud Computing for middle scale and small scale organizations. Interoperability and Portability among Cloud providers is the only solution to avoid vendor lock-in situation and a roadmap toward more competitive market for cloud providers and users. The focus of this research work is to solve portability conflict in PaaS offerings using virtual appliance. This thesis presents an automated architecture for portability conflicts raised during deployment and migration of an application in a PaaS environment by separating three fundamental PaaS entities: Application, User Data and Infrastructure. Resource Discovery is a cumbersome process and often suffers due to interoperability issues. In the proposed architecture, this has been addressed through Semantics and Similarity Graphs. Semantics refers to study of meaning rather than syntax. User requirements are expressed semantically using ontology. Similarity Graphs utilize graph created from ontology and calculate similarity between two nodes by allowing numerical computation rather than syntax reasoning. Quality of Service (QoS) is maintained by signing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between all parties and it is monitored by third party SLA manager. An algorithm is proposed for providing compensation in case of violation of stated SLA. Experimental results demonstrate the working of the proposed architecture and show how portability can automatically be achieved in a PaaS environment using virtual appliance.