Towards portability and interoperability support in middleware for hybrid clouds

Abstract

Abstract-The cloud computing paradigm promises increased flexibility and scalability for consumers and providers of software services. Service providers that exploit private cloud environments offer restricted flexibility and scalability because of the limited capacity. However, such organizations are often reluctant to migrate to public clouds because of business continuity threats and vendor lock-in. Hybrid clouds potentially combine the benefits of private and public (external) clouds. Vendor lockin can be avoided when multiple external clouds are supported and effectively exploited. This paper presents a middleware platform for hybrid cloud applications. The middleware enables organizations to control the execution of their applications in hybrid cloud environments. Driven by policies, the middleware can dynamically decide which requests and tasks are executed on a particular part of the hybrid cloud. The core of the middleware, and the focus of this paper, is an abstraction layer. The abstraction layer enables portability over multiple services including data storage, blob storage, and asynchronous task execution of various PaaS platforms as well as interoperability between the PaaS platforms. We have validated the core concept by building a prototype implementation that runs on top of specific PaaS platforms as well as on a cloudenabling middleware. A document processing SaaS application has been instantiated on the middleware. Performance results have been collected for JBoss AS cluster, Google App Engine, and Red Hat OpenShift.

PaaSHopper: Policy-driven middleware for multi-PaaS environments

“…In [19], we have defined and evaluated such a uniform API for three common PaaS services, including structured storage (NoSQL), blob storage, and asynchronous task execution. However, this solution can easily be interchanged by creating or configuring different drivers with other existing abstractions, for example Hibernate OGM [23] or Impetus Kundera [24] as data access middleware.…”

“…Listing 2), and the PaaSHopper middleware will automatically adapt to the new environment. As the measurements of the migration overhead in [19] show, the abstraction layer enables the migration of the CloudPost application to different PaaS platforms without any impact on the application code. All code changes are contained within the portability drivers.…”

“…A first version of the PaaSHopper middleware architecture has been presented in previous work [18,19]. In contrast, this paper introduces an extensive motivation based on four different SaaS application cases, all based on our analysis of industrial SaaS applications.…”

Portability in clouds: approaches and research opportunities

“…Rafique et al [22] proposed an abstraction layer that provides a uniform API for three particular PaaS services, including scalable data storage, blob storage, and asynchronous task execution.…”

COBE Framework: Cloud Ontology Blackboard Environment for Enhancing Discovery Behavior

“…In PaaS model, the service providers allow the cloud consumers to use operating systems, and virtualized servers together with its associated services for running applications over the internet. Finally, In SaaS model, the service providers allow cloud users to remote access of applications or software as a web-based service to avoid the cost of buying software [10,11].…”