Portable applications in Cloud and their barriers

Prerequisite – Introduction to Cloud Computing, Research challenges of cloud
Application portability in cloud computing provides flexibility to move to different platforms or different cloud service vendors, but technology and provider restrictions persist. When the term of application portability comes up, the benefits of corporates and cloud computing vendors crashes. Corporations wants to run their applications flawlessly across on-premise IT, private clouds and PaaS and SaaS public clouds.

Portable applications are very beneficial in migration of infrastructure, platform, and services from one cloud service provide to any other service providers. But There are some major barriers occur at the time of portability of cloud that are described below:

1. Portable applications in the cloud from a technology perspective is the lack of standardized cloud APIs which can be utilize by cloud providers or vendors in developing their technology-based products. API interoperability allows users to execute applications on different cloud using common APIs as a way forward.
2. Hard-to-port database schemas and uncertainty about rights of users to get access and manage data stored in the cloud. Even if you can get access to your data, you can’t essentially get it into another system because application data schemas aren’t certainly compatible.
3. Formats of Files, like SQL, in relational database (RDB) are quite arduous to port because relationship in the database should be constant when it is being divided over multiple databases. Nowadays, portability having certain structured database is still quite difficult to achieve. Non-structured or non-SQL data is preferred standard of data encapsulation and storage.
4. Data access problems are another aspect of service-related data life-cycle management.

Major Cloud portability tips in the meantime are described below:

1. Assure that the application and its supportive components, such as databases and tools, not only trust an operating system and an underlying cloud infrastructure.
2. Negotiate access to data and other services up-front. Once the contract is made and data is migrated onto the vendors system, influence for negotiation should be limited.
3. A platform for applications that can support must be found as much as is possible nowadays, several cloud environments. This will only be of value, however, if the cloud service vendor supports that particular management platform.
4. Comprehend the technical services, such as APIs, which provide access to the data stored by cloud providers.
5. Preserve decisions to host data in the cloud at top level of corporations, rather than letting employees procure cloud-based systems without sufficient review.

The above barriers of potability conclude that application portability is quite arduous to achieve without a practicality in-house application support team and a compliant cloud service vendor.