Dynamic Migration of Cloud Services

In the last couple of years, cloud computing records a rapidly increasing popularity due to scalable, elastic infrastructures that are charged according to their usage and do not have to be maintained. However, the offerings of cloud providers sometimes drastically differ and therefore, it gets more and more difficult for users to compare clouds and choose a proper provider for a specific service. Furthermore, the demand of changing the provider and migrating existing services results from the growing market. The main problems and obstacles that follow the migration of services from the technical point of view are: First, cloud providers are using own platforms or APIs so services have to be adapted to them, and second, services cannot be migrated without an interruption. Besides the technical aspects, there are also economical ones. Companies have to spend a lot of time comparing different offerings and adapt their applications. This paper proposes the dynamic Platform as a Service (dynPaaS), a new form of Platform as a Service provider that addresses these issues. The dynPaaS framework abstracts existing clouds, finds the optimal cloud for a service according to its requirements and provides transparency about the underlying clouds. It monitors clouds and hosted services, dynamically migrates services between clouds on the basis of changing parameters, and optimizes the resource usage of integrated clouds. The result is a price reduction for both, the cloud users and the dynPaaS provider.