Framework for Supporting Heterogenous Clouds Using Model Driven Approach

Cloud computing has gained the popularity of todays IT sector because of the low cost involved in setup, ease of resource configuration and maintenance. The increase in the number of cloud providers in the market has led to availability of a wide range of cloud solutions offered to the consumers. These solutions are based on different cloud architectures and usually are incompatible with each other. It is very hard to find a single provider which offers all services the end users need. Cloud providers offer proprietary solutions that force cloud customers to decide the design and deployment models as well as the technology at the early stages of software development. One of the major issues of this paradigm is; the applications and services hosted with a specific cloud provider are locked to their specific implementation technique and operational methods. Hence, moving these applications and services to another provider is a tedious task. This situation is often termed as vendor lock-in. Hence a way to provide portability of applications across multiple clouds is a major concern. According to the literature very few efforts have been made in order to propose a unified standard for cloud computing. DSkyL provides a way for reducing the cloud migration efforts. This chapter aims to sketch the architecture of DSkyL and the major steps involved in the migration process.