Cloud Configuration Modelling: a Literature Review from an Application Integration Deployment Perspective

Abstract

Enterprise Application Integration has played an important role in providing methodologies, techniques and tools to develop integration solutions, aiming at reusing current applications and supporting the new demands that arise from the evolution of business processes in companies. Cloud-computing is part of a new reality in which companies have at their disposal a high capacity IT infrastructure at a low-cost, in which integration solutions can be deployed and run. The charging model adopted by cloud-computing providers is based on the amount of computing resources consumed by clients. Such demand of resources can be computed either from the implemented integration solution, or from the conceptual model that describes it. It is desirable that cloud-computing providers supply detailed conceptual models describing the variability of services and restrictions between them. However, this is not the case and providers do not supply the conceptual models of their services. The conceptual model of services is the basis to develop a process and provide supporting tools for the decision-making on the deployment of integration solutions to the cloud. In this paper, we review the literature on cloud configuration modelling, and compare current proposals based on a comparison framework that we have developed.