Migrating Applications to Clouds

Despite its rapid development in recent years, cloud computing has only gradually been employed in many areas such as infrastructure, platforms, data, and applications. The advantages of cloud applications include that users can utilize them in a low-cost and riskless way; these applications can be quickly deployed on the clouds without duplication of work so that developers can focus on enhancing their QoS to improve core competitiveness. As such, cloud applications are recognized as a trend for the next generation of business applications, and hence how to migrate these on-premises applications to the clouds has become a topic of interest in the literature. This chapter presents a method for the migration process that specifically addresses the cloud features and the migration of on-premises applications to the cloud. As an illustration, the method is applied to the migration of a customer-support application.