Toward easy migration of client-server applications to the cloud

As an emerging model for the delivery of software services, Software as a Service (SaaS) has come to be a trend in the software industry due to its low investment, flexibility, and accessibility. However, migration of conventional client-server systems and applications to SaaS may involve complicated processes. This paper proposes a framework for helping software developers to migrate conventional client-server applications to SaaS based applications in cloud environments, with multi-tenancy support and without redeveloping or modifying original application software. The migration framework consists of four components: service proxy, data proxy, tenant management, and cloud resources management. The four framework components, together with an original client-server application, can be seamlessly deployed on the cloud as SaaS. The proposed migration framework has been implemented on the Amazon AWS cloud engine.