Towards a Model-Driven Solution to the Vendor Lock-In Problem in Cloud Computing

Due to the heterogeneity of today's cloud providers, migrating applications between providers is extremely challenging. This lack of portability is caused, in part, by vendor lock-in: the strong dependency created between a cloud user and a cloud provider since the cloud user deploys their software on a specific cloud platform. This paper outlines our plans to address vendor lock-in by applying techniques from the area of model-driven engineering (MDE), a contemporary and principled approach to software engineering that has sometimes been used to achieve greater portability of software. This paper presents preliminary models of two widely used IaaS services and an analysis of literature reporting real cases of software migration, and introduces a research question and method for our future work on using MDE to address vendor lock-in for cloud computing.