Enabling Dynamic Deployment of Cloud Applications Using a Modular and Extensible PaaS Environment

The Platform as a Service (PaaS) model promotes the development and deployment of applications on top of middleware solutions offered by the provider. Deploying an application in this model entails both the deployment of the application on top of the platform, but potentially also the deployment of the middleware components required by the application. Existing works enable the abstraction from the underlying infrastructure and allow for the creation of generic deployment plans for middleware components that automate the deployment of applications. In this paper we propose a middleware-oriented deployment approach that defines how the deployment of middleware components can be defined in a manner that allows to offer them as PaaS building blocks, and enable the automatic deployment of application components on them. We also present an evaluation of our proposal, together with the lessons learned during this activity.