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Cloud refactoring: automated transitioning to cloud-based services

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Abstract

Using cloud-based services can improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of a software application. However, transitioning an application to use cloud-based services is difficult, costly, and error-prone. The required re-engineering effort includes migrating to the cloud the functionality to be accessed as remote cloud-based services and re-targeting the client code accordingly. In addition, the client must be able to detect and handle the faults raised in the process of invoking the services. As a means of streamlining this transitioning, we developed a set of refactoring techniques—automated, IDE-assisted program transformations that eliminate the need to change programs by hand. In particular, we show how a programmer can extract services, add fault tolerance functionality, and adapt client code to invoke cloud services via refactorings integrated with a modern IDE. As a validation, we have applied our approach to automatically transform two third-party Java applications to use cloud-based services. We have also applied our approach to re-engineer a suite of services operated by General Electric to use cloud-based resources to better satisfy the GE business requirements.

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Notes

  1. http://memoranda.sourceforge.net.

  2. Open-source OSGi implementations include Apache Felix (http://felix.apache.org/site/index.html) and Knopflerfish (http://www.knopflerfish.org). Among large commercial OSGi projects are the Spring Framework (http://www.springsource.org/) and the Eclipse IDE (http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/).

  3. http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html.

  4. http://jaligner.sourceforge.net.

  5. http://barbecue.sourceforge.net.

  6. http://pmd.sourceforge.net.

  7. The services are exposed through Apache CXF-DOSGi.

  8. http://www.ebi.ac.uk/soaplab/.

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Acknowledgement

GE Global Research has provided realistic cloud migration scenarios that motivated some of the refactoring techniques discussed in the article. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation through the Grant CCF-1116565.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 24060, USA

    Young-Woo Kwon & Eli Tilevich

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  1. Young-Woo Kwon
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  2. Eli Tilevich
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Correspondence to Young-Woo Kwon.

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Kwon, YW., Tilevich, E. Cloud refactoring: automated transitioning to cloud-based services. Autom Softw Eng 21, 345–372 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-013-0136-9

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