The AppScale Cloud Platform

72 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/13/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING A s compute power, disk storage, and highend network communication costs plummet, cloud computing has emerged to provide intuitive, utility-style access to vast pools of resources (compute, storage, networking, and software services). Although such processing power is cheap and readily available, accessing it from cloud infrastructure providers via infrastructure as a service (IaaS) currently requires significant expertise, experience, and time to customize, configure, deploy, and manage virtual machines (VMs). Recent advances in platform-level cloud computing (platform as a service, or PaaS) have significantly simplified cloud use by giving developers complete software/runtime stacks (versus the self-service VMs of IaaS) on which to execute their Web-accessible applications (apps) and services. PaaS systems offer programmatic access to scalable, distributed, and fault-tolerant cloud services, which eliminates the need for developers to write or deploy their own, and lets them focus on innovation. Cloud platform application services typically include key-value, relational, object, or blob data storage, data caching, email and messaging, authentication, monitoring, resource/service acquisition, background tasking, and data analytics technologies, among others. Extant PaaS systems automatically fully or partially configure, deploy, and scale the apps and services they execute. Unfortunately, given the current state of the art in PaaS systems, a key barrier to their widespread use remains: lock-in to a particular cloud system or app service implementation. We can address this portability problem with a new cloud platform called AppScale.