Fast Development Platforms and Methods for Cloud Applications

This paper proposes a cloud application framework, which integrates both the development and production environment seamlessly. The framework consists of the client-side integrated development environment (IDE), and the server-side service portfolio and cloud controller. The IDE has requirement definition, architecture design and application prototyping tools, and it can simulate execution of large-scale applications in developers' PCs. The service portfolio incorporates data from these tools and enables automatic data sharing between them, thereby avoiding setback and redundancy. To accommodate the applications on the cloud, the cloud controller utilizes the resource structures designed in the IDE and generates virtual machines (VMs) from templates, in which a verified OS and middleware for large-scale data processing are packaged. The behavior of VMs and applications will be automatically monitored and catalogued as a guideline for the next project. With these comprehensive approaches, the system integration methods can be streamlined and the acceleration of development can be easily demonstrated.