Supporting the Development and Operation of Multi-cloud Applications: The MODAClouds Approach

Vendor lock-in and cloud outages are two important challenges that make IT managers reluctant in widely adopting the cloud within the enterprise. Vendor lock-in happens when the adoption of cloud provider-specific technologies and APIs forces consumers to stay with the same provider even if they would like to change. Cloud outages can happen to any provider, as the events of the last years have largely demonstrated, and have a critical impact on the actual reliability of cloud applications. A solution to both problems could be to support application developers and operators in the adoption of a multi-cloud approach: applications are built to run and replicate on different clouds, and mechanisms for fast switching from a cloud installation to the other are offered. In the MODAClouds project we pursue this approach and rely on model-driven development combined with risk analysis and quality prediction. In this paper we provide an overview of our approach and present the architecture of the corresponding platform.