Model-Driven Engineering Meets the Platform-as-a-Service Model

Organisations who want to migrate their applications to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments have a lot of PaaS vendors to chose from and many PaaS offerings within them. At the PaaS abstraction level within the cloud service model, each vendor offers many different configurations to meet the specific organisation’s criteria to migrate to PaaS and the application’s requirements. PaaS providers and their offerings differ in terms of the supplied execution environments, databases, web servers, or development tools. Enterprises have difficulties to choose the right PaaS offering for them to deploy their applications to and have to manually configure their applications according to the PaaS selection. All in all, this is an error-prone process which model-driven approaches can facilitate. This paper shows the meta models needed to describe the application to be deployed to a PaaS offering, the PaaS offering itself, and the migrated applications with re-scattered components to both the local premises and PaaS. The InCLOUDer decision support system uses these meta models to support the deployment of the application to the PaaS offering which best helps enterprises in achieving the criteria which motivate them to start using PaaS environments. InCLOUDer keeps some of the application’s components locally to fulfil the constraints of organisations related to security, data privacy, performance, compatibility, and governance.