Legacy applications on the cloud: Challenges and enablers focusing on application performance analysis and providers characteristics

The advent of Cloud computing led to new ways for developing, engineering, providing and consuming services. As a paradigm building on a set of combined technologies, clouds enable on-demand service provisioning with guaranteed levels of quality on virtualized resources across disparate administrative domains. The latter has been one of the main factors for the wide adoption of clouds. Nevertheless, one class of applications has not yet taken advantage of the added-value of clouds: legacy applications. In this paper we highlight the challenges that arise when porting legacy applications on cloud environments and propose enabling technologies for overcoming these challenges and the corresponding limitations. We emphasize on application analysis and aspects oriented to quality of service, multi-tenancy contexts that affect the application behaviour at runtime, as well as characterization of providers in order to support decision making regarding the optimum ones to host the aforementioned legacy applications following their analysis.