MAT: A Migration Assessment Toolkit for PaaS Clouds

Abstract

Different PaaS (Platform as a Service) Clouds offer different set of capabilities and services and have different constraints on types of application that can be hosted on their platforms. Migrating existing enterprise applications to such platforms thus is non-trivial and needs a thorough assessment of the system to be migrated. In this paper, we present a novel approach for automated assessment of applications for migration to a target PaaS platform. We take an approach of systematically studying typical external technical services that different types of applications need in a traditional non-PaaS deployment and evaluate support for each of services in major PaaS environments. We have created rich sets of repositories each for technical capabilities and services used by typical enterprise applications as well as for the different technical services exposed for use by PaaS platforms along with their limitations and caveats. Using these repositories, our approach analyses the source code as well as the configuration files to recursively extract the services it requires and then tries to map them to a target PaaS platform. The approach results in a detailed report of the parts of the system that can migrate as-is, which need some changes, as well as those which can't be migrated at all due to the limitations of the chosen PaaS platform.