Avoiding Lock-In: Timely Reconfiguration of a Virtual Cloud Platform on Top of Multiple PaaS and IaaS Providers

We describe our work with a major telecom company in creating a broker that enables them to retain independence from the various PaaS and IaaS providers that they use to support their own SaaS offer on the cloud. To achieve this goal, the broker starts by setting up the required operating environment across the desired mix of PaaS and IaaS providers, and then installs and configures the telco's software on top of that virtual platform. The automation and articulation of these procedures confers the company a considerable flexibility. By updating the list of preferred PaaS providers maintained by our system and forcing a redeploy of the whole environment, it can move services from one supplier to the next, or even to virtual machines running in-house, in a matter of minutes. The most favorable combination of outsourcing and insourcing can be constantly pursued, by pondering factors such as cost, SLAs, and other factors on a provider-by-provider basis.