Lifting Existing Applications to the Cloud: Abstractions, Separation of Responsibilities and Tooling Support

He Huang, Zhicheng Zeng, Tu Ouyang

2022

Abstract

The benefits from running applications on the cloud: easy to scale up, low cost from competition of many cloud vendors, and many others, are compelling reasons for more and more applications being developed and/or deployed against the cloud environment. This trend promptes application developers to rethink the structure of their applications, the runtime assumption of the applications, and what are the appropriate input/output abstractions. New generation of applications can be built from the scratch with the recent development of the cloud-native primitives (clo, nd). However there are many existing applications which were previously developed against single-machine environment. Some of them now are needed to be lift to the cloud so as to enjoy the benefits from cloud environment such as computation elasticity. What does a principled process look like to lift such applicaitons to the clcoud? In this paper, we present what we have learnt from helping our customers to lift their existing applications to cloud. We identify the key challenges from common questions being asked in practice, and we present our proposed methodologicl framework, to partially address these key challenges. The solution is comprised of various methods identifing right abstractions for cloud resources, separating the responsibilities between application developer and cloud DevOps, and how to leverage tooling to streamline the whole process. We try to design our methods as much cloud-vendor agnostic as possible. We use the lifting process of one application, a web crawler from our practice, to exemplify various aspects of the proposed methodological framewor.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Huang H., Zeng Z. and Ouyang T. (2022). Lifting Existing Applications to the Cloud: Abstractions, Separation of Responsibilities and Tooling Support. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 1: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-758-569-2, pages 601-608. DOI: 10.5220/0011109000003179

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis22,
author={He Huang and Zhicheng Zeng and Tu Ouyang},
title={Lifting Existing Applications to the Cloud: Abstractions, Separation of Responsibilities and Tooling Support},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 1: ICEIS,},
year={2022},
pages={601-608},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011109000003179},
isbn={978-989-758-569-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 1: ICEIS,
TI - Lifting Existing Applications to the Cloud: Abstractions, Separation of Responsibilities and Tooling Support
SN - 978-989-758-569-2
AU - Huang H.
AU - Zeng Z.
AU - Ouyang T.
PY - 2022
SP - 601
EP - 608
DO - 10.5220/0011109000003179