Monitoring applications and services to improve the Cloud Foundry PaaS

Platform as a Service (PaaS) systems fully exploit the potential of elastic Cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer, by providing computational platforms for the developers characterized by a set of frameworks and runtimes. In these scenarios, the developers could focusing only on the implementation side of web applications without having to deal with configuration of the environment the web apps require for running properly. Services represent a central point of PaaS systems, providing external features for web applications such as SQL databases, messaging systems, and any kind of external software required by the developer. The monitoring of the availability and the performances of these Services plays an essential role in PaaS environments. The paper tackles above issues focusing on the real use case of the Cloud Foundry PaaS; collected results assess the effectiveness of the proposed monitoring function and confirm its feasibility and low overhead.