Towards a goal-oriented approach to adaptable re-deployment of cloud-based applications

Due to the on-demand and dynamic nature of Cloud, there is an increasing interest for automated management of adaptation and (possibly) re-deployment of cloud applications to realize quality requirements and evolution needs autonomously at run-time. This paper proposes a fast and automated approach for adapting and redeploying a cloud application at run-time as dictated by evolution needs and sudden changes in the operating environment conditions. The proposed approach exploits a graph-based model and an algorithm that extracts a sub-graph identifying the adaptation processes to be executed according to evolution changes. The approach is general enough to be implemented by any cloud application management framework. A TOSCA-based description of the structure and management aspects of the cloud application may be updated according to the above mentioned sub-graph. Then, this description may be processed by a TOSCA-compliant runtime environment to effectively adapt and possibly re-deploy the cloud application in an automated manner. The paper also illustrates the instantiation of this generic approach for adapting an e-commerce cloud application.