Prison Break: A Generic Schema Matching Solution to the Cloud Vendor Lock-in Problem

Porting applications from one cloud platform to another is difficult, making vendor lock-in a major impediment to cloud adoption. Model-driven engineering could be used to determine how applications might run on different platforms, if platform schemas could be matched. However, schema matching typically relies on linguistic and structural similarities, and cloud schema terms diverge so much that such matching is impossible. To address this challenge, we introduce Prison Break: a novel, semi-automated and generic schema matching process. Prison Break solves the divergent vocabulary problem by using web search results as a similarity metric, thus incorporating domain knowledge without constructing a dictionary, lexicon or thesaurus. We tested Prison Break by matching schemas from two major cloud providers: Windows Azure and Google Application Engine. We determined that Prison Break helps solve the vendor lock-in problem by reducing the manual efforts required to map complex correspondences between cloud schemas. This brings us one step closer to automatic model migration across cloud platforms.