Migration to Multi-Image Cloud Templates

IT management costs increasingly dominate the overall IT costs. The main hope for reducing them is to standardize software and processes, as this leads to economies of scale in the management services. A key vehicle by which enterprises hope to achieve this is cloud computing, and they start to show interest in clouds outside the initial sweet spot of development and test. As business applications (e.g., a travel application or a web catalog) typically contain multiple images with dependencies, e.g., in a 3-tier architecture, one is starting to standardize on multi-image structures. Benefits are ease of deployment of the entire structure and consistent later management services for the business applications.

Enterprises have huge investments in their existing business applications, e.g., their web design, special code, database schemas, and data. The promises of clouds can only be realized if a significant fraction of these existing applications can be migrated into the clouds. We therefore present analysis techniques for mapping existing IT environments to multi-image cloud templates. We propose multiple matching criteria, leading to tradeoffs between the number of matches and the migration overhead, and present efficient algorithms for these special graph matching problems. We also present results from analyzing an existing enterprise environment with about 1600 servers.