Managing a SaaS application in the cloud using PaaS policy sets and a strategy-tree

This paper introduces a framework and a methodology to manage a SaaS application on top of a PaaS infrastructure. This framework utilizes PaaS policy sets to implement the SaaS providers elasticity policy for its application server tier. A strategy-tree is utilized at the SaaS layer to actively guide policy set selection at runtime in order to maintain alignment with the SaaS providers business objectives. Results from an experiment conducted on a real cloud are presented in support of this approach.