Portability in clouds: approaches and research opportunities

The migration towards Cloud environments is still hindered by several barriers. One of them is the low portability of the applications that are consuming Cloud services. This paper intends to provide an image of the state of the art in this particular topic and to identify the potential paths to follow in order to solve the problem. The main concerns are the portability reasons, scenarios, taxonomies, measurements, requirements, and current technical solutions (through open standards, open application programming interfaces, semantics and model-driven engineering). A research agenda is following the current analysis of the state of the art.