Difficulties to be overcome in using portability applications in the cloud

When application portability issues arise, the interests of the enterprise and cloud computing providers collide. Enterprise organizations want to seamlessly run their applications on the premise of an enterprise's internal it, private cloud and platform-Service (PaaS) and software-Services (SaaS) public cloud. Portability applications give users the flexibility to do this-and move to different vendors-but suppliers are not rushing to send business to their competitors, said Dan Cornell, chairman of Denim group in San Antonio.

These conflict requirements and technical challenges that implement portability of applications make today's cloud usage challenging.

Ideally, an organization would be able to send and receive applications and data from any device to any cloud computing platform. Today, however, the only guaranteed use of the application runs on two different clouds-if two different clouds run the same software, said Mark Skilton, global director of global infrastructure services at Capgemini, Paris.

Without simple application portability, vendor lock-in is unavoidable, experts say. "If it doesn't like the services that cloud vendors offer through his service level agreement, then he's going to move to another cloud provider," Bill Claybrook said. Bill Claybrook is president and analyst at New River Marketing, Concord, Massachusetts. Today, migrating from a temporary application usually takes only a second, "for example, it's not easy to transfer applications or data from Amazon EC2 to Terremark or Rackspace," Claybrook said.

Enterprise migration to the cloud platform any change in the software can cause performance problems even when running the same software as the previous vendor. Provide portability of applications, not just the application itself, Claybrook said. The source cloud and target cloud are likely to be very different: different management programs, support for different operating systems, different security, storage and network models, and support for different database systems. At the same time, the management tools working in the source cloud may not work in the target cloud and so on.

From a technical point of view, the biggest barrier to portability applications in the cloud is the lack of a standardized cloud API for vendors or cloud service providers to develop their own technology based products. Today, Skilton says, application portability is about moving from portability to API disclosure. API interoperability enables users to use common open APIs to work with applications in different clouds.

The definition of an API may not be completely transparent, which can cause many problems. Sometimes a seemingly open API standard is not, as it is wrapped around a particular platform, Skilton said. This eliminates the flexibility to use the API around.

The other two portability issues are difficult to migrate to the database schema and to access and manage the uncertainty of customer equity stored in the cloud data. "Even if you have access to your data, you may not necessarily be able to add it to another system because the application's data schema is not necessarily compatible," Cornell said.

Skilton says file formats in relational databases such as SQL are not easy to migrate because the relationships in the database must be consistent when the data is split across multiple databases. Today, the portability of structured databases is still difficult. One answer is to use NoSQL or unstructured data as the preferred standard for data encapsulation and storage.

Data access issues are an aspect of service-related data lifecycle management. Examples include the right to migrate data and the right to delete data stored in the cloud, Skilton said.

Experts say that in terms of data access, companies must stand firm in contract negotiations. Fully disclose whether third parties are allowed to access your data, Claybrook said. For example, can cloud service providers be forced to provide data access to third parties, such as the police? Do you control the physical location of the data?

Initial portability Application standards

Some industrial organizations, such as the Oasis,open group and the OpenStack project, are the most active organizations working in the field of cloud portability and interoperability specifications. Only open stack was kicked off by the Rackspace company before 2012-and Claybrook expected it to produce the best results in the long term. "However, everything today is immature and the future of cloud supplier support is uncertain," the expert said. ”

Most cloud service providers will support the creation of cloud computing standards, but a large part of that support will be empty talk, Cornell said. They will not stick to the standard because they want to differentiate between their products and the competitive hand. "All manufacturers want to lock their customers in their products," he said. Typically, unless the requirement is huge, the vendor will not bounce around the standard because it is a TCP/IP protocol.

Meanwhile Cloud portability tips

While standards are being developed, companies assume the burden of facilitating the portability of the entire cloud platform application. Experts provide the following best practices:

"Make sure that the application and its supporting components, such as databases and tools, do not depend on the operating system and the underlying cloud infrastructure," claybrook.

Cornell said the consultation visits data and other facilities. Once contracts are signed and data is moved to the supplier system, the leverage of the negotiations is limited.

Looking for an application-management platform that can be supported-it's almost possible now-in some cloud computing environments, Claybrook said. This will only be valuable, however, if the cloud provider supports that particular management platform.

Learn about technical facilities such as application interfaces (APIs) that provide access to data stored by your cloud service provider, Cornell said.

Keep data hosted in the cloud at the highest level of your organization, rather than allowing your employees to get a cloud-based system without adequate scrutiny.

In the final analysis, application portability is difficult to implement today without a savvy in-house application support team and a compliant cloud service provider. Consider the importance of alternatives and locking in the interoperability and freedom of the Organization, experts say. If the needs of your organization's portability applications are not met and accepted, you cannot simply migrate applications and data to the cloud.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)