Towards Application Portability in Platform as a Service

Cloud Computing has been one of the most vibrant topics in the last years. Especially Platform as a Service (PaaS) is said to be a game changer for future application development. Taking away most of the configuration work, it pledges to foster rapid application development which seems even more important in a world of complex scalable distributed systems. Whereas Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is in the process of consolidation and standardization, the PaaS market is largely fragmented offering varying ecosystem capabilities. In this situation, application portability is a major concern for companies utilizing PaaS to avoid vendor lock-in and to retain the ability for future strategical decisions. To categorize portability problems of PaaS, we define a model of current PaaS offerings and identify different portability perspectives. Starting from the model, we derive a standardized profile with a common set of capabilities that can be found among PaaS providers and matched with one another to check application portability based on ecosystem capabilities. We validate our findings with a comprehensive data set of 68 PaaS offerings together with a web-based application for portability matching. We also identify further portability problems by porting the application to different PaaS vendors, validating ecosystem portability and giving hints for future research directions.