Towards process support for migrating applications to cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is an active area of research for industry and academia. There are a large number of organizations providing cloud computing infrastructure and services. In order to utilize these infrastructure resources and services, existing applications need to be migrated to clouds. However, a successful migration effort needs well-defined process support. It does not only help to identify and address challenges associated with migration but also provides a strategy to evaluate different platforms in relation to application and domain specific requirements. This paper present a process framework for supporting migration to cloud computing based on our experiences from migrating an Open Source System (OSS), Hackystat, to two different cloud computing platforms. We explained the process by performing a comparative analysis of our efforts to migrate Hackystate to Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. We also report the potential challenges, suitable solutions, and lesson learned to support the presented process framework. We expect that the reported experiences can serve guidelines for those who intend to migrate software applications to cloud computing.