Towards Process Support for Migrating Applications to Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an active area of research for industry and academia. There are a large number of organizations providing cloud computing infrastructure and services. In order to utilize these infrastructure resources and services, existing applications need to be migrated to clouds. However, a successful migration effort needs well-defined process support. It does not only help to identify and address challenges associated with migration but also provides a strategy to evaluate different platforms in relation to application and domain specific requirements. This paper present a process framework for supporting migration to cloud computing based on our experiences from migrating an Open Source System (OSS), Hackystat, to two different cloud computing platforms. We explained the process by performing a comparative analysis of our efforts to migrate Hackystate to Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. We also report the potential challenges, suitable solutions, and lesson learned to support the presented process framework. We expect that the reported experiences can serve guidelines for those who intend to migrate software applications to cloud computing.Muhammad Aufeef Chauhan, Muhammad Ali Baba

MobiThin management framework: design and evaluation

In thin client computing, applications are executed on centralized servers. User input (e.g. keystrokes) is sent to a remote server which processes the event and sends the audiovisual output back to the client. This enables execution of complex applications from thin devices. Adopting virtualization technologies on the thin client server brings several advantages, e.g. dedicated environments for each user and interesting facilities such as migration tools. In this paper, a mobile thin client service offered to a large number of mobile users is designed. Pervasive mobile thin client computing requires an intelligent service management to guarantee a high user experience. Due to the dynamic environment, the service management framework has to monitor the environment and intervene when necessary (e.g. adapt thin client protocol settings, move a session from one server to another). A detailed performance analysis of the implemented prototype is presented. It is shown that the prototype can handle up to 700 requests/s to start the mobile thin client service. The prototype can make a decision for up to 700 monitor reports per second

Abmash: Mashing Up Legacy Web Applications by Automated Imitation of Human Actions

Many business web-based applications do not offer applications programming interfaces (APIs) to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult (for instance to synchronize data between two applications). To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) of web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bi-directional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write since they deal with end-user, visual user-interface elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a "mashup".Comment: Software: Practice and Experience (2013)

Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach

Semantic Web Services have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential, and attract significant attention from both industry and the research community. Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web Service technologies has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many systems have been developed without considering the potential of the web in integrating services and sharing resources. Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to Semantic Web Service-based systems can be a very tedious and expensive process, which carries a definite risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies which allow the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such a strategy. In this paper we propose a methodology for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services by taking the advantage of rigorous mathematical methods. Our methodology allows users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platform automatically or semi-automatically

Migrating medical communications software to a multi-tenant cloud environment

The rise of cloud computing has paved the way for many new applications. Many of these new cloud applications are also multi-tenant, ensuring multiple end users can make use of the same application instance. While these technologies make it possible to create many new applications, many legacy applications can also benefit from the added flexibility and cost-savings of cloud computing and multi-tenancy. In this paper, we describe the steps required to migrate a. NET-based medical communications application to the Windows Azure public cloud environment, and the steps required to add multi-tenancy to the application. We then discuss the advantages and disadvantages of our migration approach. We found that the migration to the cloud itself requires only a limited amount of changes to the application, but that this also limited the benefits, as individual instances would only be partially used. Adding multi-tenancy requires more changes, but when this is done, it has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of running the application