Towards automated deployment of self-adaptive applications on hybrid clouds

Cloud computing promises high dynamism, flexibility, and elasticity of applications at lower infrastructure costs. However, resource management, portability, and interoperability remain a challenge for cloud application users, since the current major cloud application providers have not converged to a standard interface, and the deployment supporting tools are highly heterogeneous. Besides, by their very nature, cloud applications bring serious traceability, security and privacy issues. This position paper describes a research thread on an extensible Domain Specific Language (DSL), a platform for the automated deployment, and a generic architecture of an ops application manager for self-adaptive distributed applications on hybrid cloud infrastructures. The idea is to overcome the cited limitations by empowering the cloud applications with self-configuration, self-healing, and self-protection capabilities. Such autonomous governance can be achieved by letting cloud users define their policies concerning security, data protection, dependability and functional compliance behavior using the proposed DSL. Real world trials in different application domains are discussed.