Dynamic program code distribution in Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds

Elastically scaling cloud computing applications are becoming more and more prevalent in today´s IT landscapes. One problem of building such applications in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud is the runtime distribution of program code, configuration files and other resources. While it is possible to include all required program code in the used IaaS base images, this severely restricts the achievable dynamicity at runtime. In this paper, we present a framework for dynamic program code distribution. Our approach handles code distribution entirely transparently on middleware layer. We base our solution on an existing middleware, CloudScale. The paper discusses the design and implementation of our code distribution approach on top of CloudScale, and numerically evaluates the practicability and performance of the approach based on an illustrative case study.