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Moving an application to the cloud: an evolutionary approach

When planning to move a legacy style application to the cloud various challenges arise. The potential size and complexity of such a project might especially discourage small or medium companies trying to benefit from the advantages the cloud promises. In addition, the field they have to address is still young and very dynamic and related technologies are rapidly changing. Based on on-going work in the context of the MODAClouds EU project, this paper describes an evolutionary, iterative approach to accomplish the migration of an existing application to a cloud based environment. Model based techniques are used to support the steps of this transition process by providing a baseline for the development of appropriate deployment architectures and the selection of suitable cloud providers. In addition they provide necessary abstractions in order to be less dependent on a specific technology stack or cloud provider.
 In order to show how we imagine the developed approach to be applied in practice we describe an existing traditional 3-tier application based on the meta-modeling platform ADOxx and how it could be moved to the cloud from the perspective of a medium-sized software manufacturing company.