TREXCLOUD: Java EE IaaS Cloud Deployment Made Easy

Cloud computing is becoming mainstream in software development, with many organizations now considering migrating their applications to the cloud. However, the task of deploying Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) applications in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds is generally daunting due to a number of manual steps necessary to configure all application components as a set of virtual machine images. This work presents a tool, TREXCLOUD, which supports the task of deploying a fully functional Java Enterprise application in IaaS clouds with a few clicks. TREX Cloud enables users to easily upload a set of files that contain the application components (e.g.,. war files, database back up, context files) so that the tool automatically deploys and configures the whole application stack in an IaaS provider selected by the user. An empirical study shows how TREXCLOUD enables users, independently of their level of expertise, to quickly deploy a complete JEE application in the Amazon cloud when compared to two different approaches: Amazon EC2 dashboard and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.