Assisting Cloud Service Migration Using Software Adaptation Techniques

The different implementations of cloud computing services developed by each cloud vendor have resulted in a heterogeneity of APIs and libraries which most developers of cloud-based applications must fight to understand. This so called vendor lock-in effect leads to a substantial increment on the development effort required to switch the initially selected cloud service used by an application to a different one. Different initiatives have emerged to solve this problem, such as standardization attempts, and intermediate systems or middlewares. Instead, our approach makes use software adaptation techniques for tackling the vendor lock-in problem and facilitating the development of cloud applications that are not coupled to any specific platform. In this paper, a case study application is presented in order to illustrate how the vendor lock-in effect appears and to make an estimation of the effort required for its migration to a different platform. This way we show the benefits of our approach for reducing the cloud service migration efforts. Such solution is sketched briefly, and the main steps of the adaptation process are described.