Emulation-as-a-Service - The Past in the Cloud

Until now, emulation of legacy architectures has mostly been seen as a tool for hobbyists and as technical nostalgia. However, in a world in which research and development is producing almost entirely digital artifacts, new and efficient concepts for preservation and re-use are required. Furthermore, a significant amount of today´s cultural work is purely digital. Hence, emulation technology appeals to a wider, non-technical, user-group since many of our digital objects cannot be re-used properly without a suitable runtime environment. This article presents a scalable and cost-effective Cloud-based Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) architecture, enabling a wide range of non-technical users to access emulation technology in order to re-enact their digital belongings. Together with a distributed storage and data management model we present an implementation from the domain of digital art to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed EaaS architecture.