Transitioning to the cloud?: a model-driven analysis and automated deployment capability for cloud services

As cloud computing becomes increasingly popular and appealing, application and service providers increasingly face questions on whether moving to the cloud would be beneficial to their business, and how should the cloud deployment of their application be realized. Analysis techniques, such as simulations, hold promise in analyzing the benefits of moving to the cloud, and while generative mechanisms can automate the deployment of applications in the cloud. This paper describes how model-driven engineering (MDE) supports both these desired capabilities by providing intuitive and automated capabilities for driving simulations of cloud infrastructures and application services to analyze the benefits of moving the applications to the cloud, and automating the deployment of these applications in the cloud.