Federating Web-Based Applications on a Hierarchical Cloud

Cloud-based infrastructures enable applications to collect and analyze massive amounts of data. Sometimes these applications are the product of green-field engineering, but frequently they are the product of the evolution of traditional RDBMS-based implementations. In any case, NoSQL databases, endowed with high availability, elasticity and scalability through their easy deployment on cloud-computing platforms, have become an attractive data-storage solution for these big-data applications. Unfortunately, to date, there is little methodological and tool support for migrating existing applications to these new platforms. In this paper, we describe a hybrid architecture for location-aware applications on hierarchical cloud, a methodology for mapping relational (including spatio-temporal) data to HBase, and a process for migrating legacy applications to the new architecture.