Re-Architecting a JEE On-Premise Web Application to Deploy It in the Cloud

Hundreds of companies trying to move their JEE applications to the cloud face different challenges because these applications were developed without considering their deployment in cloud infrastructures. This fact typically generates that those companies have to pay large infrastructure costs in their cloud deployments. In the short-term, those companies have to decide if they should continue paying those costs, or if they may re-architect part of their applications with more efficient technologies or architectures to reduce them, and at the same time incur in the costs of the re-architecting process. Using a case study, in this paper we present and evaluate several approaches that can be used by companies that want to deploy and scale their on-premise JEE applications in the cloud. Each approach looks for increasing the application scalability by introducing changes to the application architecture generating efforts to adapt the applications and reducing the infrastructure costs. We evaluate how to implement each approach, estimate their costs at development and infrastructure levels, and analyze the pros and cons of implementing each one.