Application migration to cloud : A taxonomy of critical factors

Cloud computing has attracted attention as an important platform for software deployment, with perceived benefits such as elasticity to fluctuating load, and reduced operational costs compared to running in enterprise data centers. While some software is written from scratch specially for the cloud, many organizations also wish to migrate existing applications to a cloud platform. Such a migration exercise to a cloud platform is not easy: some changes need to be made to deal with differences in software environment, such as programming model and data storage APIs, as well as varying performance qualities. We report here on experiences in doing a number of sample migrations. We propose a taxonomy of the migration tasks involved, and we show the breakdown of costs among categories of task, for a case-study which migrated a .NET n-tier application to run on Windows Azure. We also indicate important factors that impact on the cost of various migration tasks. This work contributes towards our future direction of building a framework for cost-benefit tradeoff analysis that would apply to migrating applications to cloud platforms, and could help decision-makers evaluate proposals for using cloud computing. © 2011 ACM.