Component-based scalability for cloud applications

Abstract

Cloud computing enables access to an almost unlimited amount of resources combined with usage-based accounting. However, due to their design a lot of applications are not able to exploit the elasticity provided by the cloud. In this paper, we introduce several mechanisms that allow exploitation of the component structure of applications in order to scale them in a cloud computing cluster. We present our OSGi-inspired component framework COSCA that automatically manages elastic deployment of component-based applications. It isolates components of different applications and hides distribution using a virtualized and distributed OSGi-like framework. We present the results of several experiments which show that scalability of component-based applications benefits from such a platform. Moreover, we show how lightweight and agile component-based scale-out is. Our approach eases the usage of cloud resources and scalability for component-based applications.