A New Method for Migrating Legacy Applications to the Cloud: A Finite State Process Approach

Using the cloud computing helps the enterprises to reduce their operational costs as well as to improve the scalability, availability and reliability of their services. To take advantages of this technology, enterprises have to decide how to migrate their on-premise applications to the cloud. The problem of migrating a legacy application to the cloud is very complicated and time-consuming process, due to the complexity of applications, dynamic environment of the enterprises and the variety of available cloud services. Despite many researches in this context, a formal migration model based on known patterns has not been presented yet. In this paper, Finite State Process (FSP) algebra is applied as a formal basis by which a step by step migration support system can be built automatically from the known application and cloud profiles. The proposed step by step migration model is superior to the current optimization methods that search the optimal deployment of application components to cloud services due to the fact that a step by step approach is more appropriate for dynamic environments.