Cloud4SOA: Multi-cloud Application Management Across PaaS Offerings

Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a novel paradigm that enables software developers to create (develop or integrate), deploy, execute, and manage business applications, using a service provided by a third party. The diversity and heterogeneity of the existing PaaS offerings raises several interoperability challenges. The actual Platform as a Service market is still quite young, chaotic and highly fragmented, dominated by a few providers which use and promote incompatible standards and formats. This introduces adoption barriers due to the lock-in issues that prevent the portability of data and software from one PaaS to another. Moreover, software developers do not only need to deploy applications into a specific Cloud platform, but also to migrate applications from one Cloud platform to another, and to manage distributed applications spanning multiple PaaS. In this paper, we present a multi-cloud PaaS management as a result of the Cloud4SOA European project that addresses these challenges.