Kolb, S., Wirtz G.: Towards Application Portability in Platform as a Service
Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), Oxford, United Kingdom, April 7 - 10, 2014.
Abstract—Cloud Computing has been one of the most vibrant topics in the last years. Especially Platform as a Service (PaaS) is said to be a game changer for future application development. Taking away most of the configuration work, it pledges to foster rapid application development which seems even more important in a world of complex scalable distributed systems. Whereas Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is in the process of consolidation and standardization, the PaaS market is largely fragmented offering varying ecosystem capabilities. In this situation, application portability is a major concern for companies utilizing PaaS to avoid vendor lock-in and to retain the ability for future strategical decisions. To categorize portability problems of PaaS, we define a model of current PaaS offerings and identify different portability perspectives. Starting from the model, we derive a standardized profile with a common set of capabilities that can be found among PaaS providers and matched with one another to check application portability based on ecosystem capabilities. We validate our findings with a comprehensive data set of 68 PaaS offerings together with a web-based application for portability matching. We also identify further portability problems by porting the application to different PaaS vendors, validating ecosystem portability and giving hints for future research directions.
Download(1.0 MB), Bibtex(390.0 B)
This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly
and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by
authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this
information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked
by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be
reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.