On the transition from the web to the cloud

Abstract

Although in principle two independent technologies, cloud computing is closely associated with the web in contemporary web applications. Such applications, usually developed using web frameworks, are increasingly often deployed on servers that reside in cloud to gain commonly assumed benefits from the cloud infrastructure. These benefits include scalability and elasticity, which liberates the developer from considering such issues during the development. Unfortunately, since the traditional origins of web applications and frameworks used to development them are very different from cloud computing platforms, a mismatch may emerge between the web application and the hosting cloud platform. Then, strengths of the cloud computing may be invalidated by the design of the web application. In this paper, we analyze the consequences of the transition of web application to the cloud by considering the fundamental assumptions in web frameworks and the potential challenges they introduce when used in cloud context.