A comparative study of cloud computing environments and the development of a framework for the automatic deployment of scaleable cloud based applications

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:Modern-day online applications are required to deal with an ever-increasing number ofusers without decreasing in performance. This implies that the applications should bescalable. Applications hosted on static servers are inexible in terms of scalability. Cloudcomputing is an alternative to the traditional paradigm of static application hosting ando ers an illusion of in nite compute and storage resources. It is a way of computingwhereby computing resources are provided by a large pool of virtualised servers hosted onthe Internet. By virtually removing scalability, infrastructure and installation constraints,cloud computing provides a very attractive platform for hosting online applications. Thisthesis compares the cloud computing infrastructures Google App Engine and AmazonWebServices for hosting web applications and assesses their scalability performance comparedto traditionally hosted servers. After the comparison of the three application hostingsolutions, a proof-of-concept software framework for the provisioning and deployment ofautomatically scaling applications is built on Amazon Web Services which is shown to bebest suited for the development of such a framework.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University