Transformation of a Legacy Airport Meteorology Application into a Serverless Cloud Application

Abstract

In this article we describe our continuing work on transforming a legacy application dealing with airport meteorology into a cloud application, using the concepts of serverless computing and Function-as-a-Service. In our previous work [1] we have described the architecture and concepts of our solution, and initial experiments with several FaaS tools. Here we continue the experiments, concentrating on the Apache OpenWhisk framework, which we have selected as our target serverless environment. We have further developed some of the application’s components and tried to execute them via OpenWhisk. During these experiments we have found multiple practical problems of transforming and executing legacy applications as serverless functions in OpenWhisk, and have devised solutions for these problems.