Model Driven Framework for the Configuration and the Deployment of Applications in the Cloud

Cloud computing offers a distributed computing environment where applications can be deployed and managed. Many companies are seeing substantial interest to extend their technical infrastructure by adopting cloud infrastructures. Although the choice of such an environment may seem advantageous, users are faced with many challenges, especially with regard to deployment and migration of applications in the Cloud. To address some of these challenges, we propose a new approach based on modeldriven engineering techniques (MDE), called MoDAC-Deploy, for the assistance to the configuration and the deployment of applications in the Cloud. This paper focuses on the design and the implementation of our approach. In fact, we developed a model-driven Framework with generative mechanisms to simplify and to automate cloud services deployment process, to overcome APIs heterogeneity, to minimize the vendor lock-in and to enable application portability among different cloud infrastructures by reusing configurations/deployments ”Model a configuration once and deploy it anywhere”. We conducted also a case study in order to validate our proposed approach. Our empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our MDE Framework to seamlessly deploy services in the cloud and to migrate easily between different Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) without any programming efforts. Keywords-Deployment; Cloud Computing; Model Driven Engineering.