Modeling variability and integration of web service components for achieving application portability in Cloud Computing

Abstract

newlineThe emergence of cloud computing has put an enormous impact on the organizations about the usage of IT resources. Ease of accessing the computing resources and the fundamental basis of pay-per-use in cloud computing has provided significant opportunities for organizations. Although the technology of cloud computing is exceptionally contributing to the industry-academia interface, some issues still need to be resolved for the full acceptance of the technology. newlineAmong the diverse set of issues, vendor lock-in is one of the major causes of concern for many organizations. The vendor lock-in is the situation where the user is bound to access the service from the same cloud provider regardless of the quality of service it provides. To counter this situation, the researchers worked on portability and interoperability challenges in cloud computing. The biggest challenge that comes across is the non-standardization of application programming interfaces (API) and variation in software stacks. One of the solutions is to adopt container based virtualization technology. newlineContainer-based virtualization or containerization is a technique that isolates applications and virtually packages them for deployment. On-demand distributed applications in cloud computing have revolutionized the way application is built in the IT industry. Monolithic architecture has been subdued with the rise of component- based architectures. Therefore, containerization has proven to be more beneficial in capitalizing the advantage of cloud computing. newlineThe use of containerization gave rise to another issue known as orchestrating the management of multi-component across heterogeneous cloud platforms. The deployment, configuration, enactment, and termination of the application component needed to be suitably orchestrated. newlinev newlineThis was to be done by satisfying all the component dependencies and the software support they needed in a virtualized environment.