Application migration to cloud

TLDR

Cloud computing offers elasticity and cost savings, yet migrating existing applications is difficult due to differences in programming models, data storage APIs, and performance characteristics. The study develops a taxonomy of migration tasks, quantifies their costs, and identifies factors that influence those costs to aid decision‑makers in evaluating cloud migration proposals. Applying the taxonomy to a case study of migrating a .NET n‑tier application to Windows Azure, the authors break down costs by task category and highlight key cost drivers. The authors report practical migration experiences, demonstrating the taxonomy’s applicability and the cost breakdown’s usefulness in real‑world scenarios.

Abstract

Cloud computing has attracted attention as an important platform for software deployment, with perceived benefits such as elasticity to fluctuating load, and reduced operational costs compared to running in enterprise data centers. While some software is written from scratch specially for the cloud, many organizations also wish to migrate existing applications to a cloud platform. Such a migration exercise to a cloud platform is not easy: some changes need to be made to deal with differences in software environment, such as programming model and data storage APIs, as well as varying performance qualities. We report here on experiences in doing a number of sample migrations. We propose a taxonomy of the migration tasks involved, and we show the breakdown of costs among categories of task, for a case-study which migrated a .NET n-tier application to run on Windows Azure. We also indicate important factors that impact on the cost of various migration tasks. This work contributes towards our future direction of building a framework for cost-benefit tradeoff analysis that would apply to migrating applications to cloud platforms, and could help decision-makers evaluate proposals for using cloud computing.