Characterizing PaaS Solutions Enabling Cloud Federations

Cloud Computing has opened new ways of flexible resource provisions for businesses to migrate IT applications and data to the Cloud to respond to new demands from customers. Recently, this form of service provision has become hugely popular, with many businesses migrating their IT applications and data to the Cloud to take advantage of the flexible resource provision that can bring benefits to businesses by responding quickly to new demands from customers. Cloud Federations envisage a distributed, heterogeneous environment consisting of various cloud infrastructures by aggregating different IaaS provider capabilities coming from both the commercial and academic area. Recent solutions hide the diversity of multiple clouds and form a unified federation on top of them. Many approaches follow recent trends in cloud application development, and offer federation capabilities at the platform level, thus creating Platform-as-a-Service solutions (eg. Heroku, CloudFoundry, Apcera Continuum). In his chapter we plan to investigate capabilities of these tools: what levels of developer experience they offer, how they follow recent trends in cloud application development, what types of APIs, developer tools they support and what web GUIs they provide. Developer experience is measured by creating and executing sample applications with these PaaS tools.