Uni4Cloud: an approach based on open standards for deployment and management of multi-cloud applications

Cloud computing is changing the way applications are being developed, deployed and managed. Application developers can focus on business and functionality and leverage infrastructure clouds (IaaS) to provide them low cost resources (e.g., computation, storage, and networking) that can be controlled based on application needs. However, current IaaS cloud developers have to deal with daunting tasks to configure and deploy their applications in different cloud providers. This paper presents the Uni4Cloud approach that facilitates to model, deploy and configure complex applications in multiple infrastructure clouds. We demonstrate through an enterprise application case study how Uni4Cloud facilitates to deploy components (e.g., application server, database, load balancer) in multiple clouds using a model-based approach that helps to automatically configure and deploy applications independent of IaaS cloud provider. Moreover, the approach is based on cloud computing standards such as the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) to favor interoperability and to avoid being locked in to specific cloud providers.