OPENICRA: Towards A Generic Model for Automatic Deployment and Hosting of Applications in the Cloud

Abstract

Cloud Computing offers a distributed computing environment where applications can be deployed and managed. . It is characterized by its scalability, elasticity and widely-spread use. Although the choice of such an environment may seem advantageous enough, several challenges still remain, mainly in terms of the automated deployment process of applications. This paper focuses on the design and the implementation of a new generic model for application automatic deployment, called OpenICRA, to mitigate the effects of barriers to entry, to reduce application development complexity and to simplify cloud services deployment process. We conducted two case studies to validate our proposed model. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of OpenICRA to automate and orchestrate the deployment process of different applications without any modification in their source code and optimize their implementation in terms of performance in heterogeneous Cloud environments.