CloudScale - a Novel Middleware for Building Transparently Scaling Cloud Applications

Leitner, Philipp and Hummer, Waldemar and Satzger, Benjamin and Inzinger, Christian and Dustdar, Schahram

2012 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

With the promise of seemingly unlimited IT resources, the trend of cloud computing is currently revolutionizing software engineering. However, at the moment, building applications for the cloud is a rather cumbersome and manual task. In this paper, we introduce the CloudScale middleware for building applications on top of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offerings. CloudScale allows developers to build cloud applications like regular Java programs, without dealing with the intricacies of cloud hosts (virtual machine) management, remoting, and code distribution, without handing off control over the physical distribution of their application to commercial Platform-as-as-Service (PaaS) providers. We numerically evaluate the overhead introduced by CloudScale based on an example application, and discuss advantages and limitations of the system as compared to manually deploying the application on an IaaS cloud.

doi:10.1145/2245276.2245360    Download