Towards exploiting the full adaptation potential of cloud applications

Abstract

Current technology for cloud application adaptation fails to capture two fundamental aspect of cloud environments: multiple adaptation options and interferences and dependencies among these multiple mechanisms. Addressing these aspects requires a significant extension of existing cloud tools and frameworks for engineering and executing cloud application adaptations. They should explicitly take into account: all entities of the cloud environment relevant for adaptation decisions; the concrete adaptation actions that these cloud entities may perform; and the mutual dependencies between those entities and actions. In this paper we provide the first insights towards such novel technology. As main contribution, we systematically elicit the key entities related to adaptations inside a cloud environment and explicitly document those in a conceptual model. To build this model we surveyed the literature, discussed with industrial partners with experience in cloud computing, and analyzed commercial solutions. We also provide a case study based on Amazon Web Services solutions, to show how our conceptual model can be instantiated and help developers to identify possible cloud application adaptation strategies.