Application Migration Effort in the Cloud - The Case of Cloud Platforms

Abstract

Over the last years, the utilization of cloud resources has been steadily rising and an increasing number of enterprises are moving applications to the cloud. A leading trend is the adoption of Platform as a Service to support rapid application deployment. By providing a managed environment, cloud platforms take away a lot of complex configuration effort required to build scalable applications. However, application migrations to and between clouds cost development effort and open up new risks of vendor lock-in. This is problematic because frequent migrations may be necessary in the dynamic and fast changing cloud market. So far, the effort of application migration in PaaS environments and typical issues experienced in this task are hardly understood. To improve this situation, we present a cloud-to-cloud migration of a real-world application to seven representative cloud platforms. In this case study, we analyze the feasibility of the migrations in terms of portability and the effort of the migrations. We present a Docker-based deployment system that provides the ability of isolated and reproducible measurements of deployments to platform vendors, thus enabling the comparison of platforms for a particular application. Using this system, the study identifies key problems during migrations and quantifies these differences by distinctive metrics. RQ 1: Is it possible to move a real-world application between different cloud platforms? RQ 2: What is the development effort involved in porting a cloud-native application between cloud platforms?The use case application, Blinkist, is a Ruby on Rails web application developed by Blinks Labs GmbH. The set of selected PaaS vendors includes IBM Bluemix, cloudControl, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, EngineYard, Heroku, OpenShift, and Pivotal Web Services. We analyze the feasibility of the migration in terms of portability and the effort for this task. Besides, we present a Docker-based deployment system that provides the ability of isolated and reproducible measurements of deployments to platform vendors, thus enabling the comparison of platforms for a particular application. Using this system, the study identifies key problems during migrations and quantifies these differences by distinctive metrics. In this study, we target implementation portability [3], [10] of the migration execution, i.e., the application transformation and the deployment. We focus on functional portability of the application. Data portability must be investigated separately, especially since popular NoSQL technologies impose substantial lock-in problems. With our results, we are able to compare migration effort between different cloud platforms and to identify existing portability problems.The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In Section II, we describe our research methodology including 1 See the twelve-factor methodology at http://12factor.net.

Application Migration Effort in the Cloud

“…Third, we perform a more sophisticated statistical analysis of the data resulting from the case study, including significance tests on the difference between container-based and VM-based platforms. This analysis reinforces the results from (Kolb, Lenhard, & Wirtz, 2015), hardens our interpretation, and confirms significant differences between container-based and VM-based platforms in deployment times and reliability.…”

“…This article is an extended version of our earlier work (Kolb, Lenhard, & Wirtz, 2015), in which we introduced the case study and deployability framework. We extend (Kolb, Lenhard, & Wirtz, 2015) in multiple directions.…”

“…We extend (Kolb, Lenhard, & Wirtz, 2015) in multiple directions. Firstly, we provide a more detailed description and illustration of the case study application, the vendor selection process, and the deployment tooling, as well as a more in-depth discussion of related work.…”

An exploratory study for investigating the critical success factors for cloud migration in the Saudi Arabian higher education context

“…The overall risk mitigation process can broadly be categorised into two main issues: general migration risks and security-related risks. The former risk types are further elaborated to address issues of economical evaluation (Mastroeni and Naldi, 2011), downtime prevention during migration (Svard et al, 2011), handling legacy applications (Beserra et al, 2012), cloud resource estimation (Vobugari et al, 2013) and application migration challenges (Kolb et al, 2015). Extending further into the former category of general migration risks, a number of sub-challenges are to be identified and resolved .…”

Avaliação da portabilidade entre fornecedores de teste como serviço na computação em nuvem

“…As an example, Kolb et al (KOLB;LENHARD;WIRTZ, 2015) highlighted the lack of research on the testing and evaluation of performance in unified execution environments due to differences among the vendors. Grozev and Buyya (GROZEV;BUYYA, 2014a) presented an architectural taxonomy of inter-cloud developments.…”