Cloud Adaptation and Application (Re-)Distribution: Bridging the Two Perspectives

Cloud developers have to make several decisions when running their application in a cloud environment that may lead to conflicting objectives, inefficient deployment, and inappropriate or not existing adaptation strategies. Proper decision-support tools and processes are therefore needed to make cloud developers aware of the issues that need to be considered when deploying and running applications in the Cloud. Current decision support tools for cloud developers do not provide a structured and organized process in which the cloud developers can systematically check their choices when planning the deployment, execution, and adaptation of applications in the Cloud. In this paper, we combine two previous works and introduce an approach for identifying the options for (re-)deploying application in cloud providers infrastructures and the possible strategies of adaptation that can be used by the deployed application at runtime. The key contribution is a support process that synthesizes the two approaches. We also describe a case study where our support process is applied and we indicate the alternatives for application (re-)deployment and adaptation.