Migrating and testing distributed cloud based web applications

Abstract

With the rapid development of today, developers are getting more dependent on the ability of easy and fast deployment into production. A cloud introduces the possibility of running ones system in a scalable and adaptive environment providing easy access with extensive maintenance possibilities. Extending with the possibility of having highly scalable resources available at any given time, for a reasonable cost, is a strong argument for considering cloud solution for anyone working with new development. However, the act of migrating a locally developed system, or adapting a system for cloud migration might introduce unexpected complications not initially considered. Migration is a term describing the process of adopting an existing application to be run in an unfamiliar environment. It is an important process for ensuring successful deployment in a well-defined manner, and may involve complicated steps adopting the system to the new environment. A cloud often qualifies as such an environment where applications are hosted in a virtualized off-site system. The contribution of our work is two-fold; studying the effects of migrating and implementing tests aimed for the cloud, and comparing cloud based services to their local counterparts. This has been conducted by developing and migrating an application named Track and Trace to a cloud. The results of this report provide valuable considerations as well as practical examples of solutions on problems encountered during development and migration. Migrating an application to a cloud is complicated by the fact that a cloud environment in many aspects has different properties than a local environment. It complicates data consistency, software modularity and testing due to the distributed nature of a cloud. The main difficulty in migrating an application to a cloud is to be aware of its peculiarities and to develop the application avoiding these problems.