Legacy Application Migration to the Cloud: Practicability and Methodology

Cloud computing technology has become popular of late due to several advantages it has compared to traditional computing models. For example, cloud computing helps users to save a significant amount of cost that is related to infrastructure investment, management, and maintenance. Furthermore, since cloud computing offers agility, flexibility, and scalability, applications could be deployed, developed, and scaled quickly and easily on the cloud. Nevertheless, while it is not difficult to develop a new application on the cloud, there is a question of whether legacy applications could be moved to the cloud. Knowing the answer for this question is very important to users, who have stable applications in traditional computing platforms, but want to move these applications to the cloud to leverage the advantages of cloud computing. In this paper, we will analyze features of cloud computing services to introduce an answer for this question. In particular, our answer will focus on the practicability and methodology of migrating legacy applications to the cloud. As a proof-of-concept, we support our answer with the migration of three existing applications being used at British Telecom to Google Apps Engine: one is a Java-based application while the two others are Python-based applications. Among the two Python-based applications, one requires a migration of its database in addition to the migration of the application itself.