Transforming Vertical Web Applications into Elastic Cloud Applications

There exists a huge amount of vertical applications that are developed for isolated computing environments. Due to increasing demand for additional resources there is a clear need to adapt these applications to the distributed environments. However, this is not an easy task and numerous variants are possible. Moreover, in this transition a new quality requirements become important, such as application elasticity. Application elasticity has to be built into a software system to enable smooth cost optimization at the run-time. In this paper, we provide a framework for evaluating different transformation variants of vertical Java EE multi-tiered applications into elastic cloud applications. With support of this framework the software developer is guided how to transform its application achieving optimal elasticity strategy. The framework is evaluated on slicing and evaluating elasticity of existing SaaS multi-tiered Java application used in Croatian market.