A Case Study for Deploying Applications on Heterogeneous PaaS Platforms

Cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model provides developers with the ability to deploy and manage their applications remotely through the cloud and pay only for actual usage hours. Currently, there is no standard API for PaaS management and deployment, each PaaS provider has its own specific APIs (e.g., Google AppEngine (GAE), OpenShift (OS), Cloud Foundry (CF), and Windows Azure). Therefore, deploying applications on heterogeneous PaaS platforms is considered one of the challenges that make some developers worry about using PaaS services. Such challenge can be solved by providing a standard or a generic API that overcomes PaaS API heterogeneity. The aim of this paper is to report on our effort to use and extend a generic API, namely the COAPS API, which supports deployment and management on Cloud Foundry and OpenShift. According to the work in this paper, an extension of the COAPS API is provided to include the deployment on Google AppEngine as a case study to demonstrate COAPS API generality.