Migrating Existing Applications to the Cloud

Although not a new technology, the combination of parallel computing and cloud environments can offer a number of benefits for many types of applications if the cost of application modifications combined with the costs of configuration and maintenance of the environment can be justified. This case study explores the use of cloud computing to provide a flexible deployment environment in which to run a migrated existing application using one of the popular parallel computing frameworks, Hadoop. To this end, we have documented the migration of a text-mining application, acting as a proxy for any existing application, through a number of stages progressing towards deployment in a cloud environment.