Deployment Strategies for Distributed Applications on Cloud Computing Infrastructures

Cloud computing enables on-demand access to a shared pool of IT resources. In the case of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the cloud user typically acquires Virtual Machines (VMs) from the provider. It is up to the user to decide at what time and for how long they want to use these VMs. Because of the pay-per-use nature of most clouds, there is a strong incentive to use as few resources as possible and release them quickly when they are no longer needed. Every step of the deployment process, i.e., acquiring VMs, creating network links, and installing, configuring and starting software components on them, should therefore be as fast as possible. The amount of time the deployment process takes can be influenced by the user by performing some steps in parallel or using timing knowledge of previous deployments. This paper presents four different strategies for deploying applications on cloud computing infrastructures. Performance measurements of application deployments on three public IaaS clouds are used to show the speed differences between these strategies.