Prototyping a high availability PaaS: Performance analysis and lessons learned

With cloud computing consolidation, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has been used as a solution for developing applications with low cost and maximum flexibility. However, an open challenge related to PaaS is the proper handling of multi-tier and stateful applications with support for high availability (HA); and scalability can be considered an essential feature for HA. However, dealing with several instances of the same application that access its state in a common area is not a simple task. This paper presents a novel PaaS framework, named NoPaaS, that supports the deployment of multi-tier and stateful applications assuring their availability according to the Service Availability Forum (SAF) redundancy model. The primary goal of this work is to present NoPaaS framework and prototype, and highlight challenges and open issues when providing multi-tier and stateful applications in high availability clouds.