Diploma Thesis, TU-Vienna, 2013

Cloud computing is a popular possibility for service providers to host their applications. It enables the usage of scalable, elastic infrastructures that are charged according to their usage, and do not have to be maintained. Due to the increasing demand for such services, lots of cloud providers are entering the market. Their offerings are differing strongly and many parameters are used to describe them. It gets more difficult for users to compare clouds and choose a proper provider for a specific service. Furthermore, the demand of changing the provider and migrating existing services results from the growing market. Two major technical aspects of a migration have to be considered: 1) Cloud providers are using own platforms or APIs so services have to be adapted to them. 2) Services cannot be migrated seamlessly without an interruption. Besides the technical aspects there are also economical ones. Companies have to spend a lot of time comparing different offerings and adapt their applications. Furthermore, they have to consider discounts for long term bindings.

 

This master thesis proposes the dynamic Platform as a Service (dynPaaS), a new form of Platform as a Service provider that addresses these issues. The dynPaaS framework abstracts existing clouds, including their pricing parameters and their technical issues. It finds the optimal cloud for a service according to its requirements and provides transparency about the underlying clouds. It monitors clouds and hosted services and dynamically migrates services between clouds on the basis of changing parameters. In addition the framework optimizes the resource usage of integrated clouds and migrates services according to it. The result is a price reduction for both, the service providers and the dynPaaS provider.