Are Model-driven Techniques Used as a Means to Migrate SOA

Applications to Cloud Computing?

Miguel Botto, Javier González-Huerta and Emilio Insfran

ISSI Group, Department of Information System and Computation, Universitat Politècnica de València,

Camino de Vera, s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain

Keywords: SOA, Cloud Computing, Migration.

Abstract: In recent years, cloud computing has emerged as an option to use computing resources as a solution for the

global economic crisis, namely, a cheaper way to have IT resources. Thus, many companies have started to

migrate their systems to cloud infrastructures, without the required support to carry out this process. In this

position paper, we provide an overview of the current state of research on cloud computing migration. To

understand this subject, we conducted a systematic mapping. The results suggest that research into cloud

computing migration is still in its early stages. We identify research gaps and provide general

recommendations about how these gaps may be addressed as well as future research directions that may

have potential impact on this research field.

1 INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing has become a topic of tremendous

interest as organizations struggle to improve their IT

performance. Cloud computing is described by

(Feuerlicht, 2010) as follows: it involves making

computing, data storage, and software services

available via the Internet.

The main characteristics of cloud services are:

on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access,

location independent resource pooling, rapid

elasticity, and measured service (Mell and Grance,

2011). Cloud computing is classified into service

models as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),

Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a

Service (SaaS). And their deployment models as

public, private, community and Hybrid (Mell and

Grance, 2011).

The use of cloud services enables companies to

pay only for what they use with regard computing

and network resources, rather than having to invest

in IT resources, and the requisite staff to support all

the hardware and software.

Cloud computing has associated benefits and

also challenges. One of these challenges are related

to is adoption, more specifically, the migration of

existing application to cloud computing.

There are few studies as reported in

(Mohagheghi and Sæther, 2011; Pace et al., 2010)

that present the evaluation of different cloud

platforms for performance indicators. Nevertheless,

there is not sufficient literature available to support

on process for migrating existing applications to

cloud.

In this position paper, we present a systematic

mapping study for summarizing how researchers and

practitioners migrate their applications to cloud

environments.

Our paper is organized as follows: Section 2,

presents the protocol we defined. Section 3,

described the results obtained. Finally, section 4

presents our conclusions and suggest areas for

further investigation.

2 RESEARCH METHOD

We have performed a systematic mapping study by

considering the guidelines that are provided in works

as those (Budgen et al., 2007; Kitchenham and

Charters, 2007; Petersen et al., 2008). A systematic

mapping study is a means of categorizing and

summarizing the existing information about a

research question in an unbiased manner.

Our systematic mapping study was performed in

three stages: Planning, Conducting, and Reporting.

The activities concerning the planning and

conducting stages of our systematic mapping study

208

Botto M., González-Huerta J. and Insfran E..

Are Model-driven Techniques Used as a Means to Migrate SOA Applications to Cloud Computing?.

DOI: 10.5220/0004963802080213

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2014), pages 208-213

ISBN: 978-989-758-023-9

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

are described in the following sub-section and the

reporting stage is presented in Section 4.

Planning Stage.

During the planning stage, we

performed the following activities in order to

establish a review protocol: establishment of the

research question; definition of the search strategy,

selection of primary studies, quality assessment,

definition of the data extraction strategy, and

selection of synthesis methods.

Research Question. The goal of our study is to

examine the current use of strategies of migration of

SOA applications to Cloud Computing environments

from the point of view of the following research

question: “How researchers and practitioners

migrate their SOA applications to Cloud Computing

environments and which is the effect on the

quality?”. Since our research question is too broad,

it has been decomposed into more detailed sub-

questions (see Table 1) in order for it to be

addressed.

Table 1: Research sub-questions.

Research sub-questions Motivation

RQ1: Which strategies

are used to migrate

Service-Oriented

Architecture applications

to Cloud computing

environments?

To discover which are the

most frequently used

migration strategies in the

process to migrate SOA

applications to Cloud

Computing environments.

RQ2: Which are the

consequences of

migration on product

quality?

To discover which quality

characteristics have been

affected in the migration

process.

Search Strategy. The main digital libraries that

were used to search for primary studies were:

IEEEXplore, ACM Digital Library, Science Direct,

and Springer Link. We also manually searched the

following conference proceedings: CLOUD

COMPUTING and IEEE CLOUD.

In order to perform the automatic search of the

selected digital libraries, we used a search string (see

Table 2) consisting of three parts: Migration,

Services and Cloud. The period reviewed included

studies published from 2006 to 2013 (inclusive).

This starting date was selected because 2006 was the

year in which Amazon Inc. officially launched

Amazon Web Services.

Selection of Primary Studies. Each study was

evaluated by the three authors in order to decide

whether it should be included or not, by considering

its title, abstract and keywords. The studies that met

at least one of the following inclusion criteria were

included:

 Research papers presenting migration strategies

SOA applications to Cloud Computing

environments.

 Research papers presenting examples or any

empirical studies (e.g. study cases, experiments),

about migration strategies to Cloud Computing

environments.

Table 2: Search string applied.

Concept Alternative terms or Synonyms

Migration

(migra* OR evolv* OR adopt*

OR reus* OR mov*)

AND

Services

(soa OR service*)

AND

Cloud cloud

* The asterisk symbol “*” signifies any character whose

purpose it is to include any word variation of each search term

(e.g., the search term “migra*” includes the following words:

migrate OR migrating OR migration OR…).

The studies that met at least one of the following

exclusion criteria were excluded:

 Introductory papers for special issues, books and

workshops.

 Duplicate reports of the same study in different

sources.

 Short papers with less than five pages.

 Paper not written in English.

Quality Assessment. In addition to general

inclusion/exclusion criteria, it is considered critical

to assess the “quality” of primary studies. A three-

point Likert-scale questionnaire was designed to

provide a quality assessment of the selected studies.

The questions were:

 The study presents strategies to migrate SOA

applications to Cloud Computing environments.

 The study has been published in a relevant

journal or conference.

 The study has been cited by other authors.

The possible answers to these questions were: “I

agree (+1)”, “Partially agree (0)”, and “I do not

agree (-1)”.

Data

Extraction Strategy. It was based on

providing the set of possible answers for each

research sub-question that had been defined. The

possible answers to each research sub-question are

explained in more detail as follows.

With regard to RQ1 (Strategies used), a paper

can be classified in one of the following answers:

 C1: Migration strategies.

a) Conventional: if it paper uses existing

conventional migration strategy.

b) MDD: if it paper uses strategies based on

Model-Driven Development approach.

 C2: Migration approaches (Watson, 2012).

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a) Rehost: if migration approach is

specifically to move an application without

changing its architecture.

b) Refactor: if migration approach is

specifically to move applications to a

different hardware environment and/or

change the application infrastructure

configuration without changing its external

behavior.

c) Revise: if migration approach is specifically

to modify or extend the existing code base

to support legacy modernization

requirements.

d) Rebuild: if migration approach is

specifically to rebuild the solution, discard

code for an existing application and re-

architect the application.

 C3: Migration types (Andrikopoulos et al.,

2012).

a) Replace components: a migration type

where one or more (architectural)

components are replaced by Cloud services.

b) Partially migrate: if migration type is

specifically to change some of the

application functionality to the Cloud, such

as application layers, and architectural

components.

c) Migrate the whole software stack: if

migration type is specifically to move the

application that is encapsulated in VMs and

run them on the Cloud.

d) Cloudify: if migration type is specifically to

make a complete migration of the

application tasks.

With regard to RQ2 (C4: Quality aspects), a

paper can be classified in one or more quality

characteristics from the ISO/IEC 25010 standard

SQuaRE (International Organization for

Standardization, 2011).

Synthesis Method. We applied both quantitative

and qualitative synthesis methods. The quantitative

synthesis was based on: i) Counting the primary

studies classified in each answer from our research

sub-questions; and ii) Counting the number of

papers found in each bibliographic source per year.

The qualitative synthesis is based on including

several representative studies for each criterion by

considering the results from the quality assessment.

Conducting Stage. The application of the

review protocol yielded the following preliminary

results (see Table 3): A total of 48 research papers

were therefore selected in accordance with the

inclusion criteria.

Table 3: Results of conducting stage.

Source

Potential Selected

Studies Studies

Automated search

IEEEXplore (IEEE)

ACM DL (ACM)

Science Direct (SD)

Springer Link (SL)

1026

308

152

1187

Total 2673 43

Manual search

CLOUD COMPUTING

IEEE CLOUD

Total 15 5

Overall results 2688 48

3 RESULTS

A summary of the results of our study is presented in

Table 4. Table 5 includes the papers cited in this

section. The complete list is available at:

http://users.dsic.upv.es/~jagonzalez/Webist2014/refe

rences.htm

Table 4: Results of systematic mapping.

Criteria Possible answer

Results

Studies

Percentage

(%)

C1:

Migration

strategies

Conventional

MDD

95,83

4,17

C2:

Migration

approach

Rehost

Refactor

Revise

Rebuild

44,44

40,00

15,56

C3:

Migration

types

Replace

Partially migrate

Migrate the

whole software

stack

Cloudify

14,89

31,91

53,19

C4:

Quality

aspects

Performance

efficiency

Compatibility

Reliability

Security

Maintainability

Portability

30,56

9,72

21,53

24,31

3,47

10,42

3.1 Migration Strategies

With regard to criteria C1 (migration strategies)

revealed that around 96% of the papers reviewed

presented conventional strategy (e.g., Babar et al. on

Table 5.S01, and Tran et al. on Table 5.S14).

Babar et al. (see Table 5.S01) reported their

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Table 5: Excerpt of selected papers from the review.

S01. Babar MA, Chauhan MA. A tale of migration to cloud

computing for sharing experiences and observations,

SECLOUD, 2011.

S02. Beserra P V., Camara A, Ximenes R, Albuquerque AB,

Mendonca NC. Cloudstep: A step-by-step decision process to

support legacy application migration to the cloud, MESOCA,

2012.

S03. Cai B, Xu F, Ye F, Zhou W. Research and application of

migrating legacy systems to the private cloud platform with

cloudstack. ICAL, 2012.

S04. Chauhan MA, Babar MA. Towards Process Support for

Migrating Applications to Cloud Computing, International

Conference on Cloud and Service Computing, 2012.

S05. Chee Y-M, Zhou N, Meng FJ, Bagheri S, Zhong P. A

Pattern-Based Approach to Cloud Transformation,

International Conference on Cloud Computing, 2011.

S06. Gerhards M, Sander V, Belloum A. About the flexible

Migration of Workflow Tasks to Clouds Combining on- and

off-premise Executions of Applications, Cloud Computing,

2012.

S07. Guillen J, Miranda J, Murillo JM, Canal C. A service-

oriented framework for developing cross cloud migratable

software. NordiCloud, 2013.

S08. Guillen J, Miranda J, Murillo JM, Canal C. Developing

migratable multicloud applications based on MDE and

adaptation techniques, NordiCloud, 2013.

S09. Juan-Verdejo A, Baars H. Decision support for partially

moving applications to the cloud, HotTopiCS, 2013.

S10. Lamberti F, Sanna A, Demartini C. How to move your

own applications into the cloud by exploiting interfaces

automation and accessibility features, International

Conference on Cloud Computing and Intelligence Systems,

2011.

S11. Li J, Jia Y, Liu L, Wo T. CyberLiveApp: A secure

sharing and migration approach for live virtual desktop

applications in a cloud environment. Futur. Gener. Comput.

Syst. 2013.

S12. Mohagheghi P, Sæther T. Software Engineering

Challenges for Migration to the Service Cloud Paradigm:

Ongoing Work in the REMICS Project, IEEE World Congress

on Services, 2011.

S13. Suen C-H, Kirchberg M, Lee BS. Efficient Migration of

Virtual Machines between Public and Private Cloud, Inter.

Conf. on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, 2011.

S14. Tran V, Keung J, Liu A, Fekete A. Application migration

to cloud, SECLOUD, 2011.

S15. Zhou L. CloudFTP: A Case Study of Migrating

Traditional Applications to the Cloud, Inter. Conf. on

Intelligent System Design and Engineering Applications,

2013.

experiences and observations gained from migrating

an Open Source Software, Hackystat, to cloud

computing. The aims of this job is to share their

experiences and observations gained through this

project and to analyze the literature with those

research works who intend to migrate software

systems in general and SOA based system in

particular to cloud computing.

Tran et al. (see Table 5.S14) proposed a

taxonomy of the migration tasks involved, and they

showed the costs breakdown among categories of

tasks, for a case-study which migrated a .NET n-tier

application to Windows Azure. They determined

how efforts are required for different types of Cloud

as well as identified any missing tasks.

The remaining 4% of the studies reported the use

of MDD strategy. MDD approaches rely on models

as a means of abstracting the development process

from the peculiarities of each cloud platform. These

results may indicate that there are few studies that

used this strategy to migrate existing system to cloud

computing environment (

e.g., Guillen et al. on

Table 5.S08, and Mohagheghi et al. on Table 5.S12).

Guillen et al. (see Table 5.S08) proposed a

framework MULTICLAPP. The framework follows

a three-stage development process where

applications can be modeled and coded without

developers having to be familiar with the

specification of any cloud platform.

Mohagheghi et al. (see Table 5.S12) presented a

research project REMICS to define methodology

and tools for model-driven migration of legacy

applications to a SOA with deployment in the cloud.

The project’s main objective is to develop a set of

model-driven methods and tools that support

organizations with legacy systems to modernize

them according to the “Service Cloud paradigm”.

3.2 Migration Approaches

With regard to criteria C2 (migration approach)

revealed that the most frequently used migration

approach is rehost, with around 44% of the papers

reviewed (e.g., Li et al. on Table 5.S11 and Zhou et

al. on Table 5.S15). These results may indicate that

most migrations are performed using this approach.

Li et al. (see Table 5.S11) proposed a flexible

collaboration approach, CyberLiveApp, to enable

live virtual desktop application sharing, based on a

cloud infrastructure. This approach supports secure

application sharing and on-demand migration among

multiple users or equipment. To achieve the goals of

live application sharing and migration between

VMs, a presentation redirection approach based on

VNC protocol and a VM cloning service based on

the Libvirt interface are used.

Zhou et al. (see Table 5.S15) proposed migrating

traditional applications - CloudFTP to the cloud.

They implemented FTP service on Windows Azure

Platform along with the auto-scaling cloud feature

since CloudFTP follows the application model

suggested for general Azure development.

Refactor account for around 40% of the papers

reviewed (e.g, Beserra et al. on Table 5.S02, and

Chee et al. on Table 5.S05).

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Beserra et al. (see Table 5.S02) presented Cloudstep,

a step-by-step decision process aimed at supporting

legacy application migration to the cloud. The

process relied on the creation of template-based

profiles characterizing the organization, the target

legacy application and candidate cloud providers.

Chee et al. (see Table 5.S05) proposed a pattern-

based approach Cloud Transformation Advisor

which helps users selecting appropriate enablement

patterns from a knowledge base of best practices

when planning the transformation. This knowledge

base uses a structured representation to capture

application information, cloud platform capability

information, and enablement pattern information in

order to facilitate pattern selection.

Rebuild account for around 16% of the papers

reviewed, since this way focused on rebuilding the

solution (e.g., Cai et al. on Table 5.S03).

Cai et al. (see Table 5.S03) presented the

problems with Legacy Information Systems and

proposed redevelopment, which rewrites existing

applications providing new interfaces for a

component, making it more easily accessible for

other software components; and migration.

3.3 Migration Types

With regard to for criteria C3 (migration types)

revealed that around 53% of the papers reviewed

presented cloudify (e.g., Chauhan et al. on Table

5.S04, and Lamberti et al. on Table 5.S10).

Chauhan et al. (see Table 5.S04) presented a

process framework for supporting migration to cloud

computing based on their experiences from

migrating an Open Source System (OSS), Hackystat,

to two different cloud computing platforms

(Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine).

The main activities involved in this process include

identification of requirements and potential cloud

platforms, analyzing application compatibility with

potential cloud environments, identification of

potential architecture solutions, evaluation of cloud

environments for cloud specific quality attributes,

tradeoff analysis of potential architecture solutions,

selection of architecture modifications to be

incorporated and refactoring of the system to

incorporate new architecture modifications.

Lamberti et al. (see Table 5.S10) presented a

prototype implementation, which consists of a

framework that allows today’s applications to be put

into the cloud by exploiting user interface

automation and accessibility information embedded

in modern window-based graphics toolkits. This

framework organized as a three-tier architecture

includes the particular remote program we want to

move to the cloud, a server-side gateway and a web-

based client.

Migrate the whole software stack account for

around 32% of the papers reviewed (e.g., Suen et al.

on Table 5.S13). Suen et al. (see Table 5.S13)

proposed and evaluated techniques for both

instance-based and volume-based storage in the

public and private cloud infrastructure for efficient

and effective transfer and storage of VM images.

The main focus was on both the public and private

cloud infrastructure and the movement of VMs

between them.

Lastly, partially migrate account for around 15%

of the papers reviewed (e.g., Gerhards et al. on Table

5.S06, and Juan-Verdejo et al. on Table 5.S09).

Gerhards et al. (see Table 5.S06) addressed the

demand for a consistent framework that allows a

mixture of on and off-premise calculations by

migrating only specific parts to a Cloud. It used the

concept of workflows to present how individual

workflow tasks can be migrated to the Cloud

whereas the remaining tasks are executed on-

premise.

Juan-Verdejo et al. (see Table 5.S09) proposed a

cloud migration framework to assist in the moving

of the target application by following a local and

cloud deployment model instead of an all-or-nothing

approach. Besides this framework envisions that

parts of the application are kept locally while others

parts are migrated to cloud infrastructures.

3.4 Quality Aspects

With regard to criteria C4 (quality aspects) revealed

that the most frequently quality aspects were

performance/efficiency and security account for

around 31% and 24% respectively (Guillen et al.

(see Table 5.S07)) since on cloud environments the

elasticity property of applications where quick and

secure deployment is typically required. Others

quality aspects as maintainability and compatibility

account for around 3% and 9% respectively. This is

because of quality aspects such as maintainability to

play a minor role because the cloud providers are

responsible of this partly on their platforms.

On the other hand, reliability and portability

account with 21% and 10% respectively received

less considerations (e.g., Babar et al. (see Table

5.S01)), where the authors stated that one example

of such requirement is constrains on the geographic

locations of data storage places. For some

applications, it is required that data should not store

outside a particular region. In IaaS clouds, data is

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maintained at different location for reliability and

cost effectiveness.

It is worthy to mention that the analysis of the

number of research studies on cloud migration

showed that there has been a growth of interest on

this topic since 2009. Figure 1 shows the number of

selected publications per year and source.

Figure 1: Number of publications by year and source.

4 CONCLUSIONS

The results suggest that research into cloud

computing migration is still in its early stages. We

identify research gaps and provide general

recommendations about how these gaps may be

addressed as well as future research directions that

may have potential impact on the field.

Some of the gaps found are: i) MDD approach

had been rarely used in the process to migrate SOA

applications to Cloud environments; and ii) Some

quality characteristics which we consider relevant in

applications (reliability, maintainability, portability)

had not received appropriate coverage.

Our results also confirmed some claims stated by

other researchers according to the cloud migration:

there is a lack of literature to support the migration

process. We recommend the use of Model-Driven

Development approach since it provides a higher

abstraction level than traditional programming

languages. We are also intended to address some of

the research gaps discovered. For instance,

addressing migrate SOA applications to Cloud

environment through a migration framework using

MDD techniques taking advantage of its benefits.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported by the Senescyt-

Ecuador (scholarship program 2011) and ValI+D

fellowship program (ACIF/2011/235).

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