CMotion: A framework for migration of applications into and between clouds

The number of applications and services hosted in the cloud grows steadily, because of significant advantages in cost, flexibility, and scale compared to traditional IT. However, major difficulties in this field are (i) the migration of existing applications into the cloud and (ii) the increasing vendor lock-in which denotes the inability to leave a certain cloud provider without significant effort. Current approaches do not offer a holistic solution: Either they require the user to provide the application in a certain standardized way or they are only able to migrate one specific type of component. As a consequence, the migration of composite applications with different types of components is not supported. To overcome this limitation we propose the Cloud Motion Framework (CMotion) which leverages existing application models and provides support to migrate composite applications into and between clouds. Based on the application model, the framework evaluates alternative ways to host each component. CMotion assumes that the dependencies of components are modeled explicitly and the components are self-contained.