Conformance Checking and Simulation-based Evolutionary Optimization for Deployment and Reconfiguration of Software in the Cloud

Book excerpt: Many SaaS providers nowadays want to leverage the cloud’s capabilities also for their existing applications, for example, to enable sound scalability and cost-effectiveness. This thesis provides the approach CloudMIG that supports SaaS providers to migrate those applications to IaaS and PaaS-based cloud environments. CloudMIG consists of a step-by-step process and focuses on two core components. (1) Restrictions imposed by specific cloud environments (so-called cloud environment constraints (CECs)), such as a limited file system access or forbidden method calls, can be validated by an automatic conformance checking approach. (2) A cloud deployment option (CDO) determines which cloud environment, cloud resource types, deployment architecture, and runtime reconfiguration rules for exploiting a cloud’s elasticity should be used. The implied performance and costs can differ in orders of magnitude. CDOs can be automatically optimized with the help of our simulation-based genetic algorithm CDOXplorer. Extensive lab experiments and an experiment in an industrial context show CloudMIG’s applicability and the excellent performance of its two core components.