Open-Source Cloudware Support for the Portability of Applications Using Cloud Infrastructure Services

Initially intended to support elastic and long-running Web applications, cloud computing paradigm is currently associated with a large variety of services, from infrastructure to software. In this context, the portability of the applications, based on cloud services, even only of infrastructure type, has become a challenge. To overcome this situation, several recent research and development efforts are targeting new methods, tools, and standards to avoid the problems of vendor lock-in. One outcome of such efforts resulted in a special category of open-source platform (as a) services that can be modified by application developers according to their specific needs. Looking deeper into this category, the present chapter provides an analysis of the emerging open-source platform (as a) service and points toward one particular new solution, targeting application developers and sustaining the concept of elastic Web applications as well as of reusable open-source components.