ERCIM, together with 13 European partners, has launched PaaSage, a major research initiative with the goal of developing an open and integrated platform to support model based lifecycle management of Cloud applications.

 

Cloud solutions are currently still insufficient and require a high level of expertise on the part of the developer and the provider to properly exploit the capabilities offered by Cloud technologies. Cloud infrastructures are not standardized and porting an existing application to a Cloud platform is still a very challenging task, leading to a strong interdependence between the client application and the Cloud platform. Developing once and deploying on many Clouds is not a viable proposition as things stand.

This is the challenge that the PaaSage consortium will address.

PaaSage will deliver an open and integrated platform to support both design and deployment of Cloud applications, together with an accompanying methodology that allows model-based development, configuration, optimisation, and deployment of existing and new applications independently of the existing underlying Cloud infrastructures.

"PaaSage will provide the relevant means to significantly improve programmability, usability and performance of Clouds beyond current state of the art approaches", says Keith G Jeffery, scientific coordinator of the project.

"We have to admit that European industry is lagging behind in business creation and development on basis of Cloud computing technologies”, adds Pierre Guisset, project coordinator, “Our objective with PaaSage is to develop the tools that will enable European small and large businesses to take a leading position in exploiting Clouds".

Keith Jeffery added: "Typically a business will be developing its in-house server cluster to an in-house Cloud to obtain benefits of elasticity and eco-friendliness. However, when elasticity needs to extend beyond the in-house environment to a public cloud there are interoperability problems and provider proprietary solution constraints. These will be overcome by PaaSage".