Towards a Unified Management of Applications on Heterogeneous Clouds

Abstract

The diversity in the way cloud providers offer their services, give their SLAs, present their QoS, or support different technologies, makes very difficult the portability and interoperability of cloud applications, and favours the well-known vendor lock-in problem. We propose a model to describe cloud applications and the required resources in an agnostic, and providers-and resources-independent way, in which individual application modules, and entire applications, may be redeployed using different services without modification. To support this model, and after the proposal of a variety of cross-cloud application management tools by different authors, we propose going one step further in the unification of cloud services with a management approach in which IaaS and PaaS services are integrated into a unified interface. We provide support for deploying applications whose components are distributed on different cloud providers, indistinctly using IaaS and PaaS services.