Abstract
Cloud computing is emerging as a major trend in
the ICT industry. While most of the attention of the research
community is focused on considering the perspective of the
Cloud providers, offering mechanisms to support scaling of
resources and interoperability and federation between Clouds,
the perspective of developers and operators willing to choose
the Cloud without being strictly bound to a specific solution is
mostly neglected.
We argue that Model-Driven Development can be helpful
in this context as it would allow developers to design software
systems in a cloud-agnostic way and to be supported by model
transformation techniques into the process of instantiating the
system into specific, possibly, multiple Clouds. The MODACLOUDS
(MOdel-Driven Approach for the design and execution
of applications on multiple Clouds) approach we present here
is based on these principles and aims at supporting system
developers and operators in exploiting multiple Clouds for the
same system and in migrating (part of) their systems from
Cloud to Cloud as needed. MODACLOUDS offers a qualitydriven
design, development and operation method and features
a Decision Support System to enable risk analysis for the
selection of Cloud providers and for the evaluation of the Cloud
adoption impact on internal business processes. Furthermore,
MODACLOUDS offers a run-time environment for observing
the system under execution and for enabling a feedback loop
with the design environment. This allows system developers to
react to performance fluctuations and to re-deploy applications
on different Clouds on the long term.
the ICT industry. While most of the attention of the research
community is focused on considering the perspective of the
Cloud providers, offering mechanisms to support scaling of
resources and interoperability and federation between Clouds,
the perspective of developers and operators willing to choose
the Cloud without being strictly bound to a specific solution is
mostly neglected.
We argue that Model-Driven Development can be helpful
in this context as it would allow developers to design software
systems in a cloud-agnostic way and to be supported by model
transformation techniques into the process of instantiating the
system into specific, possibly, multiple Clouds. The MODACLOUDS
(MOdel-Driven Approach for the design and execution
of applications on multiple Clouds) approach we present here
is based on these principles and aims at supporting system
developers and operators in exploiting multiple Clouds for the
same system and in migrating (part of) their systems from
Cloud to Cloud as needed. MODACLOUDS offers a qualitydriven
design, development and operation method and features
a Decision Support System to enable risk analysis for the
selection of Cloud providers and for the evaluation of the Cloud
adoption impact on internal business processes. Furthermore,
MODACLOUDS offers a run-time environment for observing
the system under execution and for enabling a feedback loop
with the design environment. This allows system developers to
react to performance fluctuations and to re-deploy applications
on different Clouds on the long term.
