Migration of Enterprise Software Applications to Multiple Clouds: A Feature Based Approach

—Cloud computing is a growing buzz in today's IT world. Many organizations are now adopting cloud computing techniques in industrial applications. As a result of the growing interest towards hosting applications in cloud there are a number of cloud service providers in the market. New products are launched continuously to make cloud hosting simple and feasible. But there are some challenges that prevent cloud platforms from being widely adopted. One of the major challenges in adopting cloud computing is the portability of applications across various clouds. Cloud based applications are normally provided as services offered by different cloud service providers. The different implementations of cloud computing services developed by each cloud provider resulted in heterogeneity of APIs which the cloud application developers find it difficult to understand and implement. This is called vendor lock-in and it increases the effort in application development. In many cases there is a need for supporting multiple clouds since one cloud provider many not always cater to the needs of an organization. And they might require a different cloud service for their applications. This paper aims to systematically analyze the different existing approaches on cloud migration to analyze the gap and report an approach based on feature models. DSkyL is an eclipse plugin which is in development phase which uses feature models to generate platform independent image files. The paper gives an overview about the architecture of DSkyL.