Portable SDN Applications on the PaaS Layer

SaaS applications often face a vendor or technical lock-in due to PaaS provider specific specifications, like cloud management APIs. As a solution, this paper presents a novel approach for developing applications more PaaS provider independent. In particular, the approach illustrates advantages of extending JavaEE application servers with a new container that executes so called Infrastructure Java Beans and provides a new set of state-of-the-art cloud APIs, which for instance enable Software Defined Networking capabilities. This container allows to manage and observe the application server itself as well as the cloud infrastructure, including compute and network resources. Thus, the application server can scale on demand controlled by the application itself and adjusted with optimized network functions that are designed application specific. In addition, all of this advantages are invested with a cloud provider independent migration possibility.